Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimated that 43,000 aquatic animals died as a result of the train derailment and chemical spill earlier this year in the town of East Palestine. In the rural community, industrial chemicals affected Leslie Run, Bull Creek, and Beaver Creek, where scientists sampled for dead fish, minnows, invertebrates, and the like, using their tools to reckon the scope of the damage.

When I read this utterly astounding calculation, scrolling my phone over coffee in Starbucks, I inappropriately laughed out loud. The sight of scores of fish, belly-up, struck me as surreal, as the opening scene to an apocalyptic film, or as the triggering image in a poem that wants to raise awareness about harm done to the environment. But it was very real.

After the disaster, a bipartisan group of legislators proposed the Railway Safety Act; Norfolk Southern, operator of the railway in East Palestine, lobbied to limit the proposed federal safety regulations. The basic facts of the derailment lend themselves more to papers and case studies of policymakers and politicos, but they’re rooted in not only the natural world, they’re rooted, too, in the complexity of the human experience.

As a poet, how can you write into that catastrophe? How can a poem artfully contain the struggle between the sanctity of nature and the unfettered business practices of corporations that put humans and the environment in harm’s way? How does a poet treat the East Palestine incident, creatively rather than journalistically?

You might wish to name and mourn the species of fish lost or meditate upon the cultural symbolism of fish. You might begin with an exploratory question such as, “What are the rights of the earth and its non-human residents, versus the rights of corporations?”

Nothing is inherently lyrical about industrial disasters and aestheticizing damage is a heavy imaginative lift. Yet, today’s poem does just that work and more. It choreographs critical language in the service of emotional truths of anxiety and exasperation. The poem delicately dwells in questions of implication and legacies of such damage.

Ashes
by Rahma O. Jimoh

After the Olambe petrol truck explosion

I run as hungry flames chase us
from our homes. As fire breezes 
through a path lined with oil
& years of labor fall into ashes.
I imagine the President’s shady
promises about compensation.
I think of trucks plying broken 
roads. Afar, gloomy smoke
levitates towards heaven.
I spot some kids —laughing,
playing ten-ten, unaware
of the wails nearby. The fire
roars in anger. I hate its wails
of loss. I close my eyes but
my nose, a Judas, breathes in 
smoke. What can poets do but
weave grief into sad analogies?
A dog barks away as if to express
fury. I know fire extinguishers
show up when it’s too late. I recall
the Ikeja bomb blast & Dana Air
crash. I count tasbih of tragedies
until my fingers falter. I wonder
what legacy this land will leave.
What next will it take from us?
Nothing works here until there is
some damage. Like a bargain of 
survival, without a written treaty
that Nigeria won’t still burn you.

"Ashes" by Rahma O. Jimoh. Used by permission of the poet.