Notes on "Nightcrawlers" by Rachel Marie Patterson
​
​
This poem asks if people are innately good, and it does the vital work of modern ecopoetry: bridging the quintessentially human with themes of destruction and loss of nature, coming to decentralize the human ego. "I have failed to warn them, don’t know how" is, I think, one of the most powerful lines in this issue. I found the speaker's consumer complicity (the crocs, paper, and plastic) and the poem's lack of offering a clear solution to the problem to be an honest position in the face of disaster. It is worth noting that in Japan, the koi is a symbol of luck, prosperity, good fortune, and perseverance. The orange koi can represent motherhood.
Notes on "Nightcrawlers" by Rachel Marie Patterson
​
“Nightcrawlers” works as subtly and instinctively as the earthworms within it. The safety and innocence imbued in the poem’s initial image decompose with each line, disaster creeping through the cracks. The piece captures the sense of environmental doom that defines the unsure times we live in, the heartbreak felt at realizing the life of the next generation will face hardships we wish we could save them from. But sometimes the safety we can offer is as futile as the rescuing of earthworms—another storm will surely drag them to the surface once again. The final image of the poem is stunningly tragic—the warmth meant to thaw and revitalize the koi becomes destructive, forcing us to ask: what will become of us as the earth’s heat and havoc turn against us? And yet, reading “Nightcrawlers,” I can’t help but clutch onto a thin branch of hope. The speaker’s daughters’ “clumsy-gentle” act of kindness toward the worms isn’t meaningless. Though the speaker believes she has “failed to warn them” of the perils to come, the poem suggests that the daughters are nonetheless imbued with a sense of care and consideration that, if cultivated, could grow into its own kind of tool against despair.
​
​​
​
​