Poem of the month Say no to expanding the death penalty

She Told Me the Earth Loves Us

She said it softly, without a need for conviction or romance.

After everything? I asked, ashamed.

That’s not the kind of love she meant. She walked through a field of gray beetle-pored pine, snags branching like polished bone. I forget sometimes how trees look at me with the generosity of water. I forget all the other breath I’m breathing in.

Today I learned that trees can’t sleep with our lights on. That they knit a forest in their language, their feelings.

This is not a metaphor.

Like seeing a face across a crowd, we are learning all the old things, newly shined and numbered. I’m always looking for a place to lie down and cry. Green, mossed, shaded. Or rock-quiet, empty. Somewhere to hush and start over.

I put on my antlers in the sun. I walk through the dark gates of the trees.

Grief waters my footsteps, leaving a trail that glistens.

— By Anne Haven McDonnell.

From “All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis” (One World, 2020) edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson. Used with the permission of the editors.

Anne Haven McDonnell is the author of “Breath on a Coal” (Middle Creek Press, 2022) and “Living with Wolves” (Split Rock Press, 2020). She teaches creative writing and climate justice at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

Any excuse for a love poem and I’m all in! Since Valentine’s day is only a couple weeks away, and since my poet laureateship is focusing on climate change, McDonnell’s poem, “She Told Me the Earth Loves Us,” is a perfect fit.

The title of this poem also functions as the first line as the poem continues on from there. This poem is written in tercets, meaning three lines to a stanza. This is a lovely form for creating order as well as tension, as we can predict where we will take a breath, and yet, the longer pause between stanzas comes after an odd number of lines. You can see this immediately in the first stanza when the “You” speaks matter of factly about the earth loving us, and the speaker answers with her guilt and shame.

I love the fourth line, That’s not the kind of love she meant. Now we are entering the heart of the poem, where McDonnell begins describing all the amazing and unique aspects of earth and how, perhaps we are loved by it. For example, when she writes a field of gray/beetle-pored pine, snags branching/like polished bone, McDonell is describing trees that are both hurt and beautiful. Already she is leading us towards the idea that the way the earth loves us is not binary, not either/or, but primal, animal, vegetable, chemical. This is a kind of love that we, as creatures of language and thought, do not know as well.

Beginning with the fourth stanza, a poignant description of the interconnectedness with the earth and our species begins. Branches are compared to bone, trees to water and finally we are told that we are breathing in the breath of everything alive around us. McConnell goes even further. Today I learned that trees can’t sleep. with our lights on. That they knit//a forest in their language, their feelings./ she writes and then states this is not metaphor. This is a truth.

The final few stanzas of the poem are filled with sadness. I’m always looking// for a place to lie down/and cry. This grief helps us feel what McConnell states is our need to start over. To return to a different relationship, an older one, with the earth. That is, there is no way to change our relationship to this planet without grieving what has been lost. But our grief is a way towards a beginning, it leaves a trail that glistens.

The idea of what we must unlearn, where we must start over, often comes to us naturally in the many ages and stages of love. We are creatures that can change. We are a species that understands why we must unlearn, and then relearn, all the old things,/newly shined and numbered.//

This month, when you feel a burst of gratitude for the early spring buds and blossoms and blue skies, please remember that we must try to learn how to be good to our one and only planet. It may be that the earth actually loves you for it!

— Julia Levine Davis Poet Laureate

n Ikeda’s Market damaged in vehicle crash: http://wp.me/p3aczg-4gM1 n Student death reported at UCD: http://wp.me/p3aczg-4gCZ n Davis police arrest alleged serial shoplifter: http://wp.me/p3aczg-4gPH n Basketball: Former Aggie tearing it up in Europe: http://wp.me/p3aczg-4gJ0

By Laura Finley Speical to The Enterprise

Republican leaders have a death penalty problem. During a time when researchers called 2022 the “year of the botched execution” and when several states have had to place a moratorium on executions amidst failed protocols, several Republic leaders are seeking to expand capital punishment.

It is no surprise that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is pro-death penalty. DeSantis has put himself on the national map by echoing if not extending many of Donald Trump’s most repressive measures.

Just days ago, DeSantis signed his fourth death warrant as Governor and first since the pandemic. It set an execution date for James Dailey, a veteran of four tours in Vietnam and Korea, who has persistently declared his innocence. There is some compelling evidence that he just might be.

His co-defendant, Jack Pearcy, had admitted at least four times that he and he alone committed the murder of Shelly Bogio in 1985. Pearcy received a life sentence and his testimony was the most significant evidence against Dailey. There is also new evidence that confirms that Dailey was not even present at the time of the murder. There is no physical or forensic evidence indicating Dailey’s involvement.

Why would the Governor issue a death warrant in a case with so many potential concerns?

DeSantis has also said he supports the death penalty in cases of child rape. The Supreme Court declared such sentences to be unconstitutional in 2008. Again, this is a regression and is particularly difficult to swallow when public support for the death penalty is among its lowest ever.

DeSantis has repeatedly criticized the jury who failed to send Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz to death. Because Florida currently requires a unanimous jury decision in capital sentencing hearings, Cruz’s life was spared by three jurors who believed his mental issues and lifelong trauma meant he should not be executed.

DeSantis has spoken about

commenTary

moving Florida back to having a non-unanimous jury making capital sentencing decisions, something the state did until 2017 when the Florida Supreme Court required the change. To go back to that implies a stinging rebuke of the Court’s authority.

Further, in the state that has the largest number of people exonerated from death row, any move that makes sentencing someone to die at the hands of the state is risking that more will be exonerated. Or, worse, wrongly executed.

Other remarks DeSantis has made indicate that, if he wins the 2024 presidency, he would carry on Trump’s binge of federal executions. President Biden has pledged to end the federal death penalty, although that has not happened to date.

DeSantis is not alone. At the same time that Tennessee officials admitted that its executioners lied about testing lethal injection chemicals for bacterial contamination, Republicans are sponsoring legislation to expand the state’s death penalty statute to include fentanyl dealers whose product resulted in someone’s death.

Investigations about execution protocols are also underway in Alabama and Ohio.

Arizona’s former Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a staunch death penalty supporter, and Governor Ducey tried to speed up executions and ordered lethal injection drugs that were not appropriate, despite the fact that the state’s last three executions were all fraught with problems.

Florida’s death penalty is a mess, as are all other systems of execution in the US. Yet it is obvious that DeSantis and most of his Republic cronies do not care. As more and more data show that the death penalty in the US is deeply broken and irreparable, it is absurd that Republicans like DeSantis are seeking to expand its use, rather than eliminate it entirely.

— Laura Finley, Ph.D., syndicated by PeaceVoice, teaches in the Barry University Department of Sociology & Criminology and is the author of several academic texts in her discipline.

“It’s

Remarks

n Poetic Pandas float down Hope River: http://wp.me/p3aczg-4gJS