By Alliance President Terry Gips and Communications Director Amy Durr
“Pinhead helicopters,” tiny Drosophila hovering around your bananas and raspberries? Fabulous Minneapolis-based poet, author and environmental activist Jim Lenfestey wonders if we’re worse than fruit flies swirling around Mother Earth. He takes us on a personal journey in his deep, evocative poem “Drosophila” from his newly-published book Time Remaining.
Lenfestey has generously shared some revealing, self-reflective thoughts with Transformative Sustainability about his poem:
“I have been amazed by pesky Drosophila, AKA fruit flies, ever since reading the stunning work of pioneering geneticist Theodosius Dobzansky who further established Darwinian genetics using fruit flies with their near instant generations for experiments.”
“The second image in the poem, of Mother Earth, stems from the same period in my life, my early twenties in the late Sixties, when I discovered for me the bracing imagery of Native America, and ever since have found the image of Mother Earth a far superior way of thinking about/seeing our unbelievably fecund home planet.”
“Finally, as a journalist and activist I have covered climate science and population studies since the mid 80’s into an almost brute terror at what our unrestrained human species has wrought, colonizing nearly every square inch of our Mother like maddening insects.”
“Of course the image of Mother Earth in bed with a ‘killer fever’ is sadly the climate of our time, our cause and effect. The lack of energy in the final line may sadly reflect my own exhaustion, forty years of climate science policy advocacy, and yet…,, though quitting not an option.”
“Drosphilia,” the poem, is featured in my 8th full length collection of poems, Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements, published in November 2024 by Milkweed Editions.”
“This is my 14th book published since 2000, after leaving my sinecure as journalist on the editorial board of the StarTribune for the creative writer’s path. I traded the facts of the outer world, which I still revere, for the facts of the inner emotional world, which I feel a stronger need to express, most often in poems, but also essays. My website is http://www.coyotepoet.com“
Drosophila
By Jim Lenfestey
How many drosophila do we
consume with our breakfast fruit,
those pinhead helicopters rising
over the raspberries picked last week
that I am eating right now?
Hovering over the section of lime
forgotten by gin and tonic drinkers
late in the evening, but not by you,
already laid and fecund by morning.
And bananas! Beloved Cavendish,
sweet crescent moon of potassium,
all drosophila all the time
once the skin spots brown.
When I worry about the world—
Father Sun rising hot and angry,
how we fail to care for Mother Earth
in the hospital with a killer fever,
to those parents we are pinhead bugs.
And though our Mother still loves us,
and hugs us, and gives us greens to eat,
and wild meat when we needed,
even she, weakened, doffing her white hat
in surrender, begins to feel that the bugs
crawling all over her body, making her ill,
are not worth even the energy to swat.