Detroit’s Great Rat Scare: A Petition Poem

Detroit’s Great Rat Scare: A Petition Poem

Chilly Fall morning. City of Detroit issues blight ticket. 

Weeds. They say. 

Unkempt nuisance. They say.

You are a rat harborage. Harborer. You ratty person. They say.

Fines and offenses. They say.

Legislatively-mandated processing fees. They say.

Court date. They say.

Better to pay it. They say. 

Fear and disgrace. I say.

Meanwhile weedwhackers and small engines vroom.

All day and into the night the vrooming vrooms.

The drone of small engines, I see you, you sassy psychological harmer.

The engines run, and the land dies.

For the bumblebees and birds. It is a total loss.

For the squirrels and unseen foragers. It is a total loss, less the trash.

For the lightning bugs. Well we’ve all read the articles that say they are dying.

Ahh! Rats might hide there, under the rockery. In the crevices.

The same crevices us ratty people keep and make flower-bomb threats.

Because– we can’t breathe concrete. 

For my ratty people friends. I suffer with you.

Scorched earth and Big Oil is the only way. They say.

Carbon capture be damned. We hear.

Let’s build temporary seawalls. They say.

Let insurance companies abandon us. Deny us. 

Let the smoke from forest fires a thousand miles away give you cancer while we slice and dice our little front yards. Under the canopy-less summer sun.

This is what we want. They contend.

Maintenance violator. They say to me. 

Rat harborer. 

Shame on them. I say.

Shame on us for letting them decide.

Shame for the agri-perma-green-thumbers.

Shame on the courage-less.

Shame the City of Detroit can’t decipher blight from just bein’ all right.

But our shame turns to dust. Under the haze of the new new.

That impermeable corner pavement and crunchy lawns.

The freshness. Ahoy, property taxes delight!

Life gone. Joy imagined. Ratless heat hot fury, having sex in the sewers.

Rat phlegm on our babies, disease and death. They say.

And all that I have left in my basket is engineered-to-die flowers in a plastic cup. 

Annually suffering non-native annuals on my stoop with my ratty friends. I say.

You see, true community wealth is in the land. 

We know that. Farmers know that. 

Climate change trauma-ists feel it. 

Are us ratty people the unseen? Unseen opossums dead on the road?

Not if with each byte we endeavor, we shout.

Talk to your district manager. They say.

Go to court, speak to deaf ears. They say.

Make a fuss. And pay anyway, I say.

Enough is enough. 

Enough of colonialist garbage green lawns.

Enough scorching our earth.

Enough of the hot pavement and lead in our soils. 

The Great Rat Scare, I say.

Unkempt perennials unite!

Make this a moment to act, ratty rat who runs deep against the rat scene.

I see you. I love you. 

Sign your name here. 

Bumblebees, birds, milkweeds, perennial blooms, lightning bugs, ratters, how many more blight tickets would you like to pay? 

1. 5. 10. Move away. They say.

I say.

How much is too much?

Unleash your policy power, let that be the next Detroit.

Our next real payday.

______________________________________________________

Thank you for signing your name to the petition.

If you were a victim of a lawn maintenance and unkempt garden rat harborage blight ticket by the City of Detroit’s backwards, anti-climate change, 1950’s era policies, please publicly say so in the petition signing. Further articles and poems as part of this series are coming, and hopefully with your action, us ratty green-thumbers will be heard.

The fact is that public health policy is, as I see it, at odds with what and how we need to use our land. And yes, even our urban land. Some rats will find home in gardens, yes. Do rats prefer just open prairie grasses without significant carbohydrate or water sources, no. We need our perennials. We need sustainable permaculture. We need carbon capture in our soils. We need better water run off management. We need white cabbages, grasses, and sunflowers to phytoremediate decades of hurt. We need rain gardens. We need canopies. We need flower, fruit, and vegetable gardens. We need herbs. We need the so-called weeds. We need things that go through the life cycle of growth to death, and we need that foliage to remain to allow insects and animals a chance to take root. We also need to spend less money on all of this public health canon and property value perceptions. The City of Detroit still has some of the highest taxes in the nation. And we use a consistent portion of that money to continue these punitive and scare-based policies. Blight ticketing milkweeds is unseen and real. Just ask the plummeting population of Monarch Butterflies.  

Likewise, the City of Detroit still has some of the highest insurance rates in the nation. We also have an incoming wave of climate change disasters, which as we know affect the most vulnerable, first. Letting our grasses grow, and our gardens flourish and die– are directly related to climate justice and our collective wellness. We constantly spend money to try to maintain the empty lots. Our lawns. And the motors continue to run every single summer day. The system is broken, I think we can all agree on that– whatever your reasoning may be. But if rats are such a big risk then why do we still see trash everywhere across our city, wouldn’t trash be paramount compared to some tall grass? If rats were such a risk then ought we be addressing food waste– which actually is the biggest contributor of rat attraction. If rats are such a big risk then why do we see permaculture-friendly and messy-garden-friendly cities on the east coast, in Connecticut, in Vermont, in Maine? Why do we see overgrown front yard gardens in Ann Arbor doing just fine? What are they doing differently in many countries in Europe, like in Scotland, or in Greece? Why can I go to communities across the world, in Africa and in South America, all in urban areas, and see earth-friendly land and yards? Are these ‘other’ communities completely overrun with rats– no, the answer is no. 

Targeting unkempt yards and so-perceived messy lawns is not how we address climate change, it is not how we handle societal inequities, it is not how we address our plaguing health(care) problems in Detroit and in the nation, and it is not how we solve an imaginary rat problem.