HORMESIS TRUMPS DRUG RULES

by Fran Davis

"Meet Ed Calabrese, Who Says a Little Pollution Can Be Good For You" —Mother Jones, February 19, 2019

EPA—call home—you’ve gone too far
axing toxic standards
            no exposure level safe
in favor of
hormesis?

Pollutants in low doses
induce adaptive responses
the hormetic scientist blares
bullhorn provided by big agro,
big chemical.

No exposure level safe
is such an onerous bar
when toxins can be taken in doses
to booster adaptability.

Monsanto, Syngenta and Dow are singing hallelujah.

Insecticides, fungicides, herbicides
those deadly bug killing, weed killing,
fungi killing - cides
may be good for us,

might not cause cancer, distrupt hormones,
frazzle neurons, mess with reproduction
if taken
in little whiffs, quick licks, tiny sips.

Proper dosage is the thing,
a smidgeon of Imidacloprid,
spurned by Europeans, but what do they know?
Still the most popular insecticide on earth.

Please thank Bayer Cropscience for their efforts on your behalf.

Bring on the neonics
5,000 times more toxic to bees than DDT,
no worries. Robot bees are coming soon,
haven’t you heard?

The sweet air hovering over strawberry rows,
Chloropicrin,
active ingredient in tear gas
may help us adapt to
tear gas.

Sell-out to agrochemical chimeras?
Ignore those faint cries, EPA.
The big guys have landed a scientist shill.
In the era of T***p
rules can be ditched like Roundup snuffs weeds.

Passionate about food safety, Fran Davis was so furious to learn the EPA might lower standards for toxics she had to launch a word protest. She lives and writes in coastal California. Her work has appeared in TheNewVerse.News, newspapers, magazines, travel books and print and online journals.

ON FLAG DAY I THINK BACK TO MY YOUNG STUDENTS SPEAKING

by Jane Herschlag

Photo: Jane Herschlag

                  
               Two planes, each crashed into one tower.
               People got hit by flying pieces of glass and concrete.
               All people care about the dead people and their families.
               We need to make flags.  The blue part stands for liberty.
               They draped a big one on the collapsed building.
               In France they were praying and many countries sang,
               God Bless America.

Despite the terrorists’ actions they see love in the world.
They see the pure, mythical America
as I saw it in childhood, the country that
saved my family from Hitler when others refused.

Our big red-white-and-blue blowing in the breeze—
a dwarfed pride still swells in me despite our lost democracy,
our taint of WMD’s, of Corporations Are People,
of Monsanto’s GMOs, for the first time in the history of the world,
changing the DNA of humans, animals, vegetation,
contaminating organic farms.

As wealth rules, America declines,
ethics fall to the toxic curb, along with the poor.
Betsy Ross what do you think of us now?
Each of your stitches were sewn with hope
and wishes for America’s wisdom.

I can’t even find my thread; it’s hidden
under years of fallen bodies,
corrupt bankers’ viscous lies.
Big Pharma and giant chemical companies
have smeared our red and blue into
our white stripes of virtue.  Our field of blue is dotted,
not by stars, but by lobbyists demands.

I want our flag to mean what it used to mean,
when city colleges were free, after
the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements.
I want my flag to wave for immigrants,
lesbians and gays.  I want again
to be proud of being American.


Jane Herschlag, a former apparel designer, textile designer, teacher, and model home decorator,  has a degree in Apparel Design, a B.A. in Creative Writing, and Women’s Studies from Hunter College.  Her Masters in Creative Writing is from CCNY.  Jane has won numerous writing awards and placed 1st with her  photography/poetry at Richter Assoc. for the Arts in Danbury.  She is an avid poet, photographer, and loves to Stage Homes for selling, refinancing, and simply enjoying.  She has shown at the Danbury Fair Mall, Midtown Café in Danbury, at the historic building—30 Bridge Street in New Milford, at American Pie Restaurant in Sherman.  She combines her passion for the visual and the written by writing ekphrastic poetry, poems inspired by the visual.  She curated readings at the West Side YMCA in NYC for seven years and has run a peer workshop since 1997.  Her Docu-Poetry collection Bully In The Spotlight is published by Pudding House Publications.