Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I think a lot about how we live in tandem with the non-human animals. The older I get, I wonder what false hierarchy has made it so we feel as if we own the world and all its inhabitants. It seems strange that any animal should have such dominion. I want to live in reciprocity with the animals and yet, I’ve reluctantly killed mice that have made their way into the kitchen during the winter months, I’ve feared rats might feast at the bird feeder, and I’ve swatted mosquitos with a vengeance known only by those who have been kept up all night possessed by the buzz of a stray bloodsucker.

Still, I wonder about the power of kindnesses, even to the smallest creatures. Especially now, as we try our best to cling to the earth in crisis. Shouldn’t we love the bugs, the vermin, the pests, the spiders, and the sparrow equally? I am not sure how to practice loving without also practicing grief on some level as we witness the harm the humans do to our shared world. But I do know that loving makes me feel better, more human, more connected, while harming even the smallest bug makes me feel just the opposite. But love isn’t easy. Especially when it comes to what might be called the creepy crawlies of our world.

Today’s poem explores what it is to have sympathy for even the much maligned cockroach. I love how this poem centers the small creature and in doing so reminds us of both our power and our powerlessness.

Compassion Comes Late
by Fady Joudah

With cockroaches, disgust
does not become revenge.
It’s terror hammered like an onion.
And when a veteran roach, steeped
(like a tea bag) in survival’s dexterity,
shapeshifts: from under the sole
of the footwear of the Gods
you’re holding—and the cockroach
reappears electric on your skin
—it blots your mind,
your indelible shrieks
on a gyrus.

Over the years, you get better at it.
A paper towel might do.
The crunch and evisceration
are easier to expunge from the scene
than the emotions that come
with cleaning your shoe of the evidence.
A pinch of sorrow 
pinches me when I kill baby 
roaches, and when I pay
the exterminator for the hygienic,
organic mass murder
of my city life.

Once, in a hospital’s ground floor 
where the cafeteria is, 
I came across a fat roach
doing what the upturned do:
fibrillating its legs in futility
that they might touch the ground again,
that this is not how 
he will be laid to rest,
his pallbearers won’t be ants.

What faulty design
flips those blattodea
like poorly made SUVs:
an excitatory chemical state
fired awry? Too much grime on the surface
and they go fishtailing? I bent low,
and with my hard plastic doctor badge,
flipped the beast back on its feet,
watched it scurry away.

And yet, I was a humanitarian once,
the western kind. Cockroaches
were minded not exterminated, caused no
worthwhile illness, nothing like
what civilization offered.
The roaches were happy in their latrines,
had all they needed,
did not venture out much.
Not even in the kitchen
where lizards prowled.

"Compassion Comes Late" by Fady Joudah. Used by permission of the poet.