The deer in the field were startled by the first shot, were you? You in your pews a thousand feet away there praying for sins praying for life while gun club gunshots rang in the holy morning, frightened the deer
and the bobolink.
Or you, while the tactical defense cleric in police surplice preached a safety sermon to the congregation there from the sacred pulpit: carry your faith defend from evil shoot to kill all lives matter…
From my window all I need to know of Earth this morning: her ombré sky indecisive her sun bold no matter glowing green buds of spring / that flash of red? a cardinal who was singing just a moment ago a duet like a record baby spider spinning another masterpiece as shadows fly across the lawn they bob and weave and somersault punctuated by bee bee bee bee the pond ripples with morning traffic turtles and ducks and frogs peep peep peep while the trees in unison sing Watch Our Here I Come!
“And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced.” — Kitty O’Meara
I am sure the red fox wonders,
as does the otter and friends,
what happened to the horizon,
why the light that’s not a star shines
from sun down to sun up
with no seeming purpose,
why the fresh salt air is slow to come
The gulls know, of course
They see from the sky
the new and larger rooftops,
the wide expanses of useless green,
the decks and porches and drives,
the construction constructed from the edge of their pond to the edge of the harbor
They see even, in the biggest living room
of the biggest house
the big screen TV,
which,
on certain mornings,
lights the horizon just like a sun,
casts shadows on the fox
and the otter
who will never know again
the rush of first light and certain breezes.
Alive without breath,
As cold as death;
Never thirsty, ever drinking,
All in mail never clinking.
My nephew, fresh from the pages of Tolkien,
sees a fish carcass on the beach,
predicts Gollum! though we both wonder.
He considers the waves left from a storm,
the wind that blows us each askew,
thinks with furrowed brow, like me
as I sift through those things I know:
the trespass of raw sewage
and slick film of leached oil,
the change of warming waters,
our persistent lack of rain.
But he’s off on a new adventure now,
throwing boulders with grunts and gasps, Take that! he yells, a holler into the wind
as loud as mine would be if allowed
to grieve the things he cannot see.