She tells me she can no longer abide her Agent Orange pain
sleeting into her, staining her skin into angry insect bites.
It’s like going to a party where you do not belong,
she explains, hands cracked,and there are so many people you never wanted to know.
I think it’s like a wormhole, a venomous lizard,
a cloud storm late winter and you did not dress for it.
She cannot cry. When my last two kitties die, what will be left
but bones on fire,
the easy burn of fingernails across an ice of skin.
| Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
Agent Orange, a terrible affliction. I can never know how terrible. I was thinking this morning, as I lay in bed feeling the mild aches and pains of my own body, how ghastly other people’s bodies (and possibly mine at some point) feel, with severe gastro-intestinal problems, severe breathing problems, cancers....Anyone can reach a point where going on seems a lot worse than ending. It’s terrible that the U.S. brought that condition on for the victims of its Agent Orange.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you would not mind letting your readers go to my site: http://projectagentorange.com/ to learn more about how it is still impacting on the Vietnamese and the Americans who fought there in the American War.
ReplyDeleteIndeed I don”t mind! Thank you for providing that link.
DeleteGiven what has been known for decades about the use of Agent Orange as a wartime poison in Viet Nam, how is it possible Monsanto has been allowed to produce and market Roundup, and how is it possible Americans have been gullible enough to use it to poison their own country?
ReplyDeletePaul, thank you for the reminder about domestic poisons, and for reminding me of your column “First Saturday Green 101,” which I hereby recommend to everybody for re- (or first) reading.
DeleteI always say good art engenders emotions in the viewer, and your poems ALWAYS have that oomph, that emotional impact, that marks them as exceptional. Turns out, the dioxin in agent orange was a contaminant resulting from the manufacture of one of the herbicidal components, 2,5,4T, that should have been processed out but wasn't in order to-you guessed it-save money. Having used Roundup quite a bit for the last 40 years as a pest control operator, I am not too thrilled with Monsanto for lying about it all this time.
ReplyDeleteRoger, it seems to me that there must be a LOT of extra story here...about the deal with the herbicidal component that wasn't processed out, about Monsanto's culpability, about the challenge from Paul that Roundup is bad and should not be used. Might a Roger's Reality column serve? Or a Side Story column? Or what? Thank you for considering this.
DeleteRoger, since I don't use any chemicals of any kind as part of my natural yard ethic, I have only very limited peripheral knowledge about Roundup--but you seem to understand some specific facts I had not heard before. If you can find time to post such information, with your permission I would be thrilled to add it to the website I am building to encourage others toward the natural yard/backyard wildlife habitat movement I became part of 20 years ago.
ReplyDeleteAgent Orange:
ReplyDeleteThe active ingredient of Agent Orange was an equal mixture of two phenoxy herbicides – 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T) – in iso-octyl ester form, which contained traces of the dioxin 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). TCDD was a trace (typically 2-3 ppm, ranging from 50 ppb to 50 ppm) - but significant - contaminant of Agent Orange.
Round Up:
Beyond the glyphosate salt content, commercial formulations of Roundup contain surfactants, which vary in nature and concentration. As a result, the primary and secondary effects of this herbicide are not exclusively due to the main active ingredient.
http://projectagentorange.com/