Take It All Back

“[Michael] Skinner’s own research in animals suggests changes to the epigenome, a swirl of biological factors that affect how genes are expressed, can be passed down through the generations.” — “A Painful Legacy,” by Andrew Curry in Science (19 July 2019), Vol 365, Issue 6450, pp. 212-215.

Kids don’t have to be raised by a traumatized mother

To learn how to carve their lives around fear

Hurt is a trickster hijacker

Interloping on reproduction when RNA transcribes DNA

But here’s the price of knowing: a hand in the hurting

Shattering the lives of small brown mice

A mother

Suffocated in plastic tubes

Dropped in cold water (that is, waterboarding)

Then returned to her offspring

Her body trembling

Her eyes trapped in the frozen snare of dissociation

Everyone knows on some level Human = Mouse

This is the deep history wisdom of indigenous peoples

Who used metaphor to create similitudes

Before labs, science, DNA

Became how humans discover

The truth of who we are

Can sncRNA ever explain how seeing with heartlight

Was replaced with observing through calculated harm?

But like a cash register

The data of despair

Entice with promise

Of profit [Prescriptions]

And some change

So we progress:

Just a mouse.

Just a species.

Just a forest.

Just a planet.