Remembering Renee Good : NPR

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Charlie Riedel/AP Earlier than Renee Good grew to become the middle of a tragic information story, she was a author.

She gained an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020, for her poem, On Studying to Dissect Fetal Pigs.

The poem is wry and humorous as she tries to reconcile science and religion and wonders, "Can I allow them to each be?"

To learn it now, you would possibly hear the particular person remembered tenderly this week as a loving mom and supportive companion, as politicians and on-line commentators scrutinize the shaky cellphone footage of her closing moments.

On Studying to Dissect Fetal Pigs

i would like again my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds which are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the bushy legs of cockroaches.

i've donated bibles to thrift shops

(mashed them in plastic trash luggage with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, those plucked from road corners from the meaty palms of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic form):

bear in mind extra the slick rubber odor of excessive gloss biology textbook footage; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

below clippings of the moon at two 45 AM I examine&repeat

ribosome

endoplasmic—

lactic acid

stamen

on the IHOP on the nook of powers and stetson hills—

i repeated & scribbled till it picked its method & stagnated someplace i can not level to anymore, possibly my intestine—

possibly there in-between my pancreas & massive gut is the piddly brook of my soul.

it is the ruler by which i scale back all issues now; hard-edged & splintering from data that used to sit down, a material in opposition to fevered brow.

am i able to allow them to each be? this fickle religion and this school science that heckles from the again of the classroom

now i can not imagine—

that the bible and qur'an and bhagavad gita are sliding lengthy hairs behind my ear like mother used to & exhaling from their mouths "make room for surprise"—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and the place these two meet

and the way usually and the way effectively

and what dies there.

The poem On Studying to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renee Good, who was shot and killed this week by a federal immigration officer. She was 37 years previous. She leaves behind three youngsters, and her spouse, who advised Minnesota Public Radio that she was, "made from sunshine."