Eve
EVE DARLENE RODRIGUES The oldest Shortraker Rockfish caught off of Alaska was thought to be about 100 years old. NOAA scientists also found that the fish’s advanced years had yet to take a toll on its reproductive abilities. “The belly was large,” NOAA researcher Paul Spencer told the Associated Press. “The ovaries were full of developing embryos.” 1 For women everywhere with or without embryos and juicy eggs You are a 60-pound wonder and 44 inches long with 100 years wrought on your bone with a bellyfull of babies ready to spawn Caught in the trawl Swept in the pull of our nets and our never sated hunger. You make me ask what is newsworthy Why men always wonder at our ovaries And our wombs that develop babies. Why they puzzle at our ability to still produce even after a certain age. Why any female becomes a unique specimen of our species When we go a different path or choose a different fruit. Why not wonder at your stories from decades of trolling the sea. What a slow sweep of your memories would dredge. What it was like to live through two world wars The Valdez oil spill The Chernobyl disaster The invention of the microwave and TV. When they slit open your bellyfull of eggs Did it reveal how the rise of warm water Has been changing your life? Rodrigues, Eve 273 Or what you thought about giving your Young to a sea that is being poisoned slowly? What grand epic you would unfold if We only knew to listen. We could heed the advice to your spawn in dark times. How to choose less perilous paths to swim. How to survive after years and years of growing uncertainty. How did you wait out the years to etch line-by-line on their ear bones, awaiting their curving and lengthening While listening for the crash of coming doom. What would you tell us, land-bound females As we give over our seeds to this grim world. I want to bind up your wishes with mine Because we navigate through riverways— The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on homelessness. We who swim every day through the seep of violence Whose lives end at the point of a drone-baited hook, or the short end of nuclear radiation. I want women in Guåhan, Afghanistan, America, and Hawai‘i to be like you, With years wrought on our bone Who still marvel the scientists by our viability and persistence. To be that Eve who slips silently in the depths of a sea Undetected by the net of greed and brutality. Who takes the fruit of knowledge, Begetting children who never turn a blind eye to truth. One who swims freely even in the deep, the darkness and the silence. And for many ages goes fiercely. NOTE 1. Associated Press, “Fisherman Catch Big, Old Alaska Rockfish,” NBCNEWS.com, 6 Apr. 2007. ...
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