New Dogs, Now, in My Own Poems

Rereading ‘Mars and Her Children’ by Marge Piercy

Thirty years ago, my parents gave me a copy of Mars and Her Children by the poet Marge Piercy. I was 13, and it was my first adult poetry book, one that was mine, not for children, and not for class. As I remember it, it was a title I chose. A couple months later, when the author came to read at our Massachusetts synagogue, she inscribed it to me.

The poetry collection is divided into sections: Violet, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo. A single poem at the beginning, “The ark of consequence,” by way of introduction, plays on the “ark” of Noah and the “arc” of rainbow that “promises / only, this world will not self-destruct.” The rainbow, “a boomerang of liquid / light,” also reminds us that we can’t escape our actions and that “what we / toss out returns in the water table.” We must remember: “we / are given only this floating round ark / with the dead moon for company and warning.”

Other poems also contain ecological warnings, like “For she is a tree of life”: “When the tree falls, we will not rise as plastic / butterfly spaceships, but will starve as the skies / weep hot acid and…