My Poetry Corner November 2023 features the poem “The Orbis Spike, 1610” by Jennifer Rahim from her poetry collection Sanctuaries of Invention (UK, 2021). Born in the Caribbean Island of Trinidad in 1963, Jennifer Rahim was an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. She held a BA (1987) and PhD (1993) in English Literature, and an MA in Theology (2016). After joining the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in 1997 as a lecturer in the Department of Liberal Arts, she went on to teach a range of courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including creative writing, literary criticism, and feminist theory. She died unexpectedly in March 2023, leaving behind a substantial body of published work.

Most of the poems in Rahim’s collection were written during the Covid-19 lockdown and a state of emergency in Trinidad. Her poems address the nature of time, place, and mass death. In “Gone Viral,” she notes in the opening lines (p. 18):

Some words return to haunt us at the root.
The world reels from an underrated flu – gone viral,
as when a presidential gaffe becomes a kind of math.
Exponential: Many people will die who have never died before.

She recalls, too, in the opening verse of “Survival” (p. 19):

Any number of days is one too many
when home is no safe haven against the death
that roams neighborhood streets,
coughs on a public bus,
reaches for toothpaste on a grocery shelf,
jogs by in less friendly parks. . . 

After watching televised reports of George Floyd’s murder and the resurgence of racist white nationalism in the United States, Rahim reminds us in “No / Language is a Virus” (pp. 59-60) that Words fly the grave, steal / the only thunder a virus can claim, / and, alive, / witness to goodness that quietly thrives.

If language is a virus,
let poetry be antidote to mend divides,
neutralize frictions, cause upset
to the anatomy of sound & sense
to oust diseased alphabets one yard,
one odyssey, one slur
and poisoned syllable at a time.

In the featured 38-line poem “The Orbis Spike, 1610” (pp. 12-13), Rahim takes us back in time to a period that has shaped our present world. So great was the mass death by smallpox and warfare of an estimated fifty million indigenous peoples of the New World, resulting from European settler invasion, beginning in 1492, that there was a recorded dip in global carbon dioxide levels.

The abandoned former farmlands in the newly depopulated Americas allowed the regrowth of forests. By 1610, the trees had trapped so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cause a significant drop in carbon levels and start a little ice age. Ecologist Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds and University College London (UCL) and his UCL colleague, geologist Mark Maslin dub the decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide the “Orbis spike,” from the Latin for world, because after 1492 human civilization has progressively globalized.

Rock, ice and sediment tell
their own stories.
They keep this memory:
in 1610, CO2 levels dipped – 
an Orbis Spike marks the martyred
on fields emptied of trees, emptied
of the dead that could no more labor.
Breathing hectares &
breathing lungs – limbs of bark & limbs
of flesh. No more alive.

The poet reflects on the un-grieved dead across a land that would never-ever be the same, where an infinite absence remains.

Now, uncaring, we strip ourselves
and call that development.
Forests burn like cancerous lungs
and First Nations are still
the first to die.

In remembering that the Ancients tell us that humans and the land share the same breath, the poet resolves to plant a poem deep in the soil. She closes with a prayer to Mother Earth:

Dear Earth,
we have grown so apart.
Now that we are full-blown, obscenely
anthropocene, will you forgive, allow us, again,
to breathe. . .

To read the featured poem “The Orbis Spike, 1610” and learn more about the work of Jennifer Rahim, go to my Poetry Corner November 2023.

Learn more about the study, published in 2015, that considers 1610 as the start date of a new, proposed geologic epoch—the Anthropocene, or recent age of humanity.