In Pascale Petit’s final, fourth, poem, What Eagle Saw, Petit turns her focus skyward. The eagle hovers above the neonatal ward, her vision both forensic and mythic, maternal and ecological. War and armistice across a battleground of the body, the family unit and the environment itself.
Petit’s images fuse the anatomical with the ecological. “She saw into the chests of newborns / where the twigs of lungs were torn.” Hearts become roses, veins rivers that dry to deserts, skins crack to release scorpions. This is the surrealist trauma poetics that defines Petit’s work: the body re-imagined as landscape, its injuries rendered as forests, gardens, rivers, deserts.
The eagle is witness. She calls for “an armistice between all the birds,” but cannot unsee what her laser vision has revealed. The act of looking itself becomes a wound, impossible to erase. That is the poet’s role too: to stare into the unbearable and transform it into myth that can be carried.
Across her four poems in this issue Petit creates a sequence of maternal hauntings and survival visions. Each expands private trauma into ecological myth, so that memory is never flat but alive, unstable, and vast.
