The American poet Jane Hirshfield has re-posted a poem she first publicised at the start of the first administration of President Trump in 2017, in protest at the new US government’s silencing of state scientists.

Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, essayist, and translator, who has published 10 collections of poetry. According to the Poetry Foundation, “in recent decades, Hirshfield has become increasingly known as a poet working at the intersection of poetry, the sciences, and the crisis of the biosphere”. 

Hirshfield re-posted her poem ‘On the Fifth Day’ on the social media platform Substack, saying:  “Once again, history repeats itself. On January 24 2017, the newly arrived Trump administration ordered scientists working for the government to be silent, instructing them not to speak about their work without prior permission from whichever political appointee now headed their agency or institute. Scientists working for the Environmental Protection Agency; researchers of fire, water, bats, soil, insects, fishes, and tree health, in the National Forest Service; anyone with a federal grant - an entire community took in the demand in shock.

“Scientists’ allegiance is to understanding how things work, to understanding, sometimes, how things might be made to work better. Science goes forward by collaboration, conversation, mutual review, information sharing. Science is not – in any sensible world - a political endeavour.   

“By the end of that eight-years-ago afternoon, I’d written a poem, ‘On the Fifth Day.’ The poem was eventually run full page in the Washington Post. It also brought me to the podium of the March for Science that spring, where I spoke it to something like 40-50,000 people at the pre-march rally on the National Mall … Similar marches happened that year all over the world; the poem was somehow also read in Seattle, Paris, Marseilles, Dublin …”

Hirshfield goes to say that “bringing ‘On the Fifth Day’ to the march” led to the founding of Poets for Science. She adds: “Anyone reading this who has written a poem with some connection to science, please consider adding it to the global gallery of science poems on the website, holding contributions from multiple countries and continents, touching on every discipline.

“This morning’s newspaper once again holds news of scientists instructed to be silent … With bird flu currently ravaging herds and flocks and proving fatal to house cats drinking raw milk, stopping public health information gathering and reporting is unimaginable. A multitude of other unimaginable undoings of every kind are also happening, in every realm. Anyone reading this already knows what they are.

“And so, once again, in bewilderment, grief, and with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, I offer here a poem from eight years ago.”

You can read ‘On The Fifth Day’ by Jane Hirshfield here