Age of Anxiety

“The sputtering earth / Snarling under their feet,” writes Dominique Christina in “Chain Gang.” The April 2016 Poetry features writers supported by Split This Rock, an organization promoting poetry that focuses on injustice and seeks to inspire social change. These authors—who describe war, racism, climate change, and other outrages—bear powerful witness to the sputtering, snarling earth.

Craig Santos Perez’s “Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015” portrays that autumnal celebration of imaginary, kitschy horrors—ghosts, goblins, and vampires—as a counterpoint to very real atrocities. Halloween is a holiday about haunting, and dead children haunt this poem:

                                    Praise the souls of black

boys, enslaved by supply chains, who carry
bags of cacao under West African heat. “Trick
or treat, smell my feet, give me something good

to eat,” sings a girl dressed as a Disney princess.
Let us praise the souls of brown girls who sew
our clothes as fire unthreads sweatshops into

smoke and ash. “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me
something good,” whisper kids disguised as ninjas.
Tonight, let us praise the souls of Asian children

who manufacture toys and tech until gravity sharpens
their bodies enough to cut through suicide nets.

 

Perez toggles between blissful American play and abusive foreign labor, between carefree and careworn children, between—more horrifyingly—live children and dead. Black boys, “enslaved by supply chains” rather than literal chains, carry “bags of cacao,” raw material for the treats the Disney princess begs for. Her costume, like most Americans’ clothes, is the product of “brown girls” at risk of perishing in sweatshops. The ninja-wannabes are relying on a stereotype of real Asians, some of whom make the “toys and tech” that Western children adore. A “chain” of cause-and-effect links the barbarities of child labor to the joys of American kids who, despite all they have, are asking for more: “give me something good.”

 

The poem itself aims to “cut through,” to “unthread,” the masquerades not only of Halloween but also of the West in general. “Pray for us,” Perez writes, “because our costumes / won’t hide the true cost of our greed.” Like naïve children, he suggests, Westerners play a kind of dress-up, deceiving ourselves about the catastrophes just over the horizon—catastrophes from which we may well benefit.

The “true cost of our greed” is, among other things, environmental destruction, and—as if to emphasize that cost—this poem links elements of the Halloween scene with manmade ecological disasters. “Darkness spills across the sky like an oil plume. / The moon reflects bleached coral.” Perez mentions the “growing pains” of weather phenomenon El Niño, which has grown more severe due to climate change. “El Niño” translates as “the boy”—it’s yet another abused child, now become an abusive one.

The poem’s title underscores the urgency of its message: “Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015” insists on its own timeliness. (The “Anthropocene” refers to our current geologic age, one characterized by the human influence on the environment.) The terrors of the era concern Martha Collins, too. In her long poem “Leaving Behind,” she writes:

shed skin feathers leaves water
-shed dividing line deciding

time    earth-age named
anthro- for us, our own doing our
undoing …

As Collins’s phrases spill over line breaks—over “dividing line[s]”—they shift in meaning. The “shed skin feathers leaves water” refers to the changes afflicting species and their habitats—but the “-shed” that follows turns “water” into “watershed,” a “deciding // time.” Now “our own doing” may become “our undoing”; now, Collins warns, we may have reached the end of the line.

Collins particularizes this sense of endings, of “undoings,” in a dreamy segment that has little overt to do with climate change:

go with me, my love, my one
into that night where one will go

before the other but still our night
boat our bed    our lovers’ tongues
songs in the night    nor the moon

by night …

This passage rings with echoes of other works. Christopher Marlowe’s classic invitation poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” begins: “Come live with me and be my love.” In her own first line, Collins darkens that lighthearted offer, transforming it into a summons to die together. Dylan Thomas’s admonition against going “gentle into that good night” lurks behind the phrase “go … into that night” and strengthens the scene’s link to death.

Here, as above, meanings evolve as sentences overflow lines: “still our night” yields to “our night / boat our bed,” as though this couple’s bed will carry them together to death. Like Perez—who connects a Halloween celebration to atrocities—Collins sees gravity in the ordinary; she links a night of sleep to the ultimate night.

And why not perceive such gravity? Anxiety about climate change steers this excerpt, too, if subtly. “Nor the moon / by night” alludes to Psalm 121: “The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.” Those lines promise that God will shield us from the weather, providing shade from the sun’s heat and sanctuary from the moon’s chill. But that was before the climate changed: what, Collins asks, will protect us now?