Page 150 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

She and I

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Next door a feminist makes her bed. Her room adjoins mine, as in dreams the

impossible clearly isn’t. She is old and venerable, and I help her with the floral

spread. I am a feminist too, only, we shall see, different, because outside a

window—whose? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. We are two feminists together for a

moment in one poem. I look out at a doe strung up by her hind legs and her

fawn, wet, as if they have been hanging in rain. And when I look again, the doe

reaches her damp head and licks her fawn. It might have been her last gesture

with her last strength. Then I am doing the dangerous thing, running with

sharpness—scissors? a knife?--outdoors on uneven ground. I wheel one way

and another, but there is no doe, no fawn. I have come to cut them down. But

someone has taken them already. I double over on the path, sobbing. It is more

like a wail, a keen. The old and venerable feminist tries to shush me. I wave her

away. I will grieve for the doe and her fawn. She cannot stop me. I am a

feminist too. And somewhere the hunter has his carcass. She and I, we have

made our choices. She has chosen the hunter. I have chosen the deer.

Notes:

This poem is based on a dream I had shortly after attending a conference with

other feminists who did not share my ecofeminist perspective on the need to

make common cause with other animals. It was one of those dreams from which

you wake raw with emotion, and I drafted the poem with urgency.

In 2007 I had gone through breast cancer treatment, and while in that process I

began to identify powerfully with the deer who live around my home. The last

animal flesh I ate was from the body of a hunted deer, and I woke that night in

terror, understanding the moment of the deer’s death. Since then, other animals

have not been food for me, and I have discovered the brilliant work of Carol

Adams, Josephine Donovan, Lori Gruen and others.