Manifesto of fragility/Terraform by Erika Meitner

Manifesto of Fragility / Terraform

Erika Meitner

In the Grand Tetons on the shores of Jenny Lake
a ranger is giving a talk: You can gently feel and
bond with the lichen; she is stroking the side

of a tree trunk. The little things in our ecosystem,
she says. And these days our ecosystem is basically
a Yiddish resistance song: “Mir Veln Zey Iberlebn”—

we will outlive them, since there are critically
endangered orcas harassing ships, biting at rudders,
and even sinking yachts off the Iberian coast.

Scientists shun the word ‘attack’ for these encounters,
claim it’s not aggression but most likely the killer whales
playing, finding pleasure, like the female sea otter

in Santa Cruz accosting surfers, committing longboard
larceny. The otter was shredding, caught a couple of
nice waves, said a sixteen-year-old dude whose board

was commandeered by the otter at Cowell’s Beach.
Multiple attempts have been made to capture her,
none successful. And in the Netherlands, magpies

and crows are turning hostile architecture into homes,
constructing cyberpunk nests from anti-bird spikes—
strips of sharp metal pins meant to keep them from

perching on buildings. I’m definitely rooting for the birds
—they’re fighting back a bit, said the Dutch biologist
studying the phenomenon. Never mind the record

wildfire season in Canada that made the weather
forecast on my phone—no matter what state I was in—
just “smoke,” the unprecedented heat domes across

the US all summer, the ocean in Miami at 100 degrees
sparking coral reef bleaching and a massive die-off.
Before we went out West, every night I walked a path

around Tiedeman’s Pond getting dive-bombed by redwinged
blackbirds, which is so common during nesting
season the local paper offers advice: make eye contact,

run for cover, wear a hat or a bike helmet when you
go out on foot. The ranger is still talking about lichen:
they colonize harsh environments, infiltrate and

wedge apart pieces of rock, serve as food in times
of stress for mammals, including humans; birds use
lichen for nest-building. Lichen are possibly the oldest

living things on earth. We will outlive them. Mir veln
zey iberlebn—the Jews who made up that resistance
song on the spot were Polish, murdered by the SS

in Lublin in 1939, ordered to sing to their own execution.
They all died against barbed wire but their song lived on.
And in the prairie restoration area, despite the drought,

despite the shrinking footprint of the pond, the ground
is still bursting with a riot of purple and yellow and white:
cup plants, plume thistles, beebalms and bergamots.

Resistance is struggle against impossible circumstance,
refusal, the will to survive in the face of annihilation;
it can also be the surviving remnant enacting revenge.

The dictionary offers sample sentences: they have shown
a stubborn resistance to change; government forces were
unable to crush the resistance; the troops met heavy

resistance as they approached the city; he went underground
and joined the resistance. In the story about
the Jews of Lublin, no one sang until one person began.