Two Poems
In the Morning
Nothing lives that hasn’t grown or yielded to effects of time or depended on primary health of the surroundings, on balance in the interlinked animals and plants, the visible and microscopic symbiosis, where nothing grows that isn’t cells, that doesn’t change or fall within the laws of matter, as the sun creates what has legs, what burns away, or swims in a drop of water, or sings from a branch in the morning, as the sun makes mind possible where light breaks open into being and nothing lives that hasn’t changed or been changing while this galaxy alone saucers with hundreds of billions of suns, given what we can see from here where nothing lives outside being and it’s easier not to think about reports of a sixth extinction than to imagine runaway climate disruption mostly caused by us or to realize that this life must end.
Return Bees to Plants on the Planet
Bring back the symbiotic thrill from when power-clawing life off of the offshore seafloor was outlawed by common sense. Oil cardinal elevators of identity in this age sitting on its aquifers. Restore the greater undone for the sake of the indivisible pollinators and keep choosing to begin once more unpolluting, improvisatory with Grandma’s bins of potatoes before light splits into its future high-rise farms. Let coal-fired histories be erased by the high tide. Re-establish refined aesthetic contemplation as the top of the wheel returns to the ground and water thunders in the falls. As fluorescence deflects downtown, blending into a blur in the city, restore Teddy Roosevelt to national forests in the middle sound of the species. Return viable composites, eyes filling in matter, and a viable future to the present. Return native gulches, illustrated monastic first letters with a slam of the screen door into its frame, where day-to-day practice learns to be energy’s bread. Return the voice that speaks with lift of small ribs of a barn owl. Restore mineral shimmering to the bearings of hosts behind their black iron gates.