Two Poems
Why the Government Should Not Step In to Save the Shearwater Fledgelings when on their First Flight to Sea, Confused by Friday Night Lights, They Fall from the Sky
In autumn, at the Kauai High stadium
when Friday night lights turn on the skies
and the island sons, strapped in gear,
test their bodies against boundaries
of other bodies, till they break through
to the sweaty victories, the fledglings
of the shearwater fall, as they attempt
first flight, steering by moon and star
to the open sea, their swindled brains aswim
with false lights. The quick-eyed children
flock to the sidelines to fetch the birds
fumbled from the smooth air’s soft clutches.
They know the drill, are careful to approach
slowly from behind so the feathered neophytes
do not scare, and wrap each ruffled bundle
in a clean towel, cradling it in arm, where
it rests, soft as a moccasin. Why such
tenderness? The shore-hugging dads
dream their sons too will fly this rock,
touch down on the mainland’s shore,
an island son made good, so every aunt
and uncle back home huddled round
the TV at holiday, can celebrate and shout,
as if his triumph were their own, “My Boy!”
Writer's Workshop at the Omega Institute Where We Learned to Hear the Poetry of Earth
Up the stone steps, past the Pool of Yearning
where pilgrims whose desire has no object
come seeking the unknown better,
we have walked this morning, poets on
break from workshop, spurred not
by piousness but news—of an animal,
a snapping turtle, female, who has stopped
on the gravel pathway to the Sanctuary to nest.
She is far from the lake of the long shore,
a ten-minutes’ walk by human strides,
and has chosen this well-traveled path
to lay her precious clutch. We watch and whisper.
Somehow, we know to whisper,
in this secluded grove where we find
ourselves turned out of doors, intruders
and witnesses both. She’s pitched
her body like a tent, head pointed toward
the Sanctuary, like a supplicant, and in her hours-
long preparation of the nest enacts a ritual
coeval with the poetry of earth wherein
all ceremony discovers the basis of its patterns
and sacred cadences. However she came
to choose this spot, once she’s covered her
frangible parcel in the incubating earth,
she will not return. And we each feel
the peril and privilege of her implicit
trust, leaving as she does her hatchings’ fate,
not in the hands, but to the feet, of pilgrims
of this wooded sanctuary, at the entrance
to which the pious remove their shoes to pray.