Dear Friends, Family, Fellow Authors, and Cherished Readers,
I am happy to present you with an epistolary essay that comes from the heart, speaks to the soul, and breaks my silence on why I am on a birthstrike.
If you would like to purchase a copy of this anthology, you can do so at this link.
I will let the editor’s description of my letter speak for itself.
“In some ways, our first entry, Elegy for an Empty Womb, is both Alpha and Omega. It is a poetic lamentation on the environmental state of our world; a love letter to a child who will never be. Caitlin Cacciatore’s gut-punch of an essay is both beautiful and painful as it opines the reasons she will never subject a child – even a child she wants – to a future so environmentally unstable.”
This poem is dedicated to M. ‘M’ for Mariana, yes, but also ‘M’ for my mother, Marah, and ‘M’ for my grandmother, the late Marie Cacciatore.
In many ways, this piece is for all of them. A line that ends with me. A proud lineage of Cacciatores who came before me.
In this essay, I greet my never-to-be-born daughter with an apology, I explain why I named her after the deepest, darkest trench at the bottom of the world, and I express my firm belief that she is better off trapped “in the amber of moments unlived.”
I am part of a growing population of women and men who love their unborn children enough not to bring them into this burning world. I am one member of a movement that demands our leaders take drastic and immediate action on environmental catastrophes, ecological destruction, anthropogenic climate change, the polluting of our atmosphere, rivers, and seas, the overproduction and overconsumption of plastic and other goods with built-in obsolescence, the unprecedented loss of biodiversity, worsening and more freuqent storms that cause increasing damage to human life and property, the rising of sea levels, the melting of the polar ice caps and the Greenland ice sheet as well as melting taking place in Antartcia and in the permafrost in Siberia and Canada: the list goes on. We will not have children in a world whose future prospects are desperately bleak.
I refuse – and in “Elegy for an Empty Womb,” I lay out the reasons why and speak to Mariana about why – in the final account of things – “I will be found guilty” of perpetuating the systems that led us to this ecological tipping point; of not doing enough to change or remedy it – and why, in the end, I love her enough to let her go.
Read it and weep, my friends, for the state of our world.
Wishing that kindness finds you where you least expect it,
Caitlin Cacciatore
