November 24, 2003

Justice, at last, for the victims of the Green River murderer
A statement by Seattle Radical Women
and a poem for the murder victims by feminist Karen Brodine

In the poem "Bones," feminist poet Karen Brodine captured the haunted feeling many people in Washington state have today as we watch the media coverage of the hunt for more murder victims' remains and the legal proceedings surrounding the Green River murderer's arrest. Gary Ridgway, a truck painter who lived and worked in Seattle, has now confessed to over 40 killings in two decades. A sociopath who hated women he imagined were "fallen," he often dumped the bodies of his victims in wooded areas along the Green River.

At the time Ms. Brodine wrote her poem in 1985, it seemed like poetic license to say that the murdered women themselves would track down their killer. But as it turned out, it was the murder victims families' refusal to let the case disappear and the DNA material of the women themselves that made Gary Ridgway admit to his horrendous crimes.

Brodine, a leader of Radical Women until her death in 1987, wrote "Bones" at a time when the police investigation was at risk of being dropped due to lack of official concern over these murdered women, many of whom were young and poor, and some of whom were women of color, runaways or prostitutes. Feminists like Brodine insisted that these women had the right to protection during their lives and justice after their deaths. Feminists like Brodine kept the pressure up at a crucial time and helped keep the investigation moving. Her poem speaks louder today that at the time it was written.

Bones

There is a procession
There is a march
up from the sodden grassy banks
of the Green River
There is a march, a procession
up from the flooding waters
of the river where forty women
were murdered and dumped one by one.
One by one, after another, the women
return. The ones who are known
by name, the anonymous too.
The women who are missing, feared
dead. They drag themselves up
from the currents of the river.
The sisters who left in the morning
and never returned. The daughters
who vanished with never a phone call.
The women who by force of circumstance
or force of a gun, climbed into a stranger's car
at midnight or at noon, on the street
or in a shopping center and drowned
in the cold grasp of the terrorist.
These are the women filed in the detective's desk:
Bones 1, Bones 2, Bones 3.
Their teeth clack in the cold waters
of the river. Their shoulder blades
scrape and gleam. Bones 4, Bones 5, Bones 6.
They drag themselves out of the waters and
march, these disappeared, these lost women
down the avenue of the homeless in Pioneer Square,
through the suburban yards of the outlying districts.
Bones 7, Bones 8, Bones 9, like pale long trees rattling,
calling out his name. To find him. And we will.

(1985)

From "No One Immune," published in Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking by Karen Brodine (Seattle: Red Letter Press, 1990)