From watching too much Nat Geo.
That’s the National Geographic channel.
Rhinos, giraffes, warthogs and springboks
have their ecological niches. I just have
to keep them there.
As much as I love the wilds of Africa and
everywhere, I must realize that rhinos,
giraffes, warthogs, and springboks have
yet to read a poem.
Yes, as everyone knows, mediation
and water are wedded forever.
-Herman Melville.
Come, you soft-shelled poets filled with sea-water.
Come and leak your speech on thirsty beaches!
Come and christen this hour the necessary source.
Come and sing the ocean’s primal power.
Come and listen to the seas—the rivers—the lakes.
Come and bring tribute to the tributary.
Yes, come and find your calling; your true vocation:
The marriage of mind to cherished hydration.
We are thoughtful. We shoe horses
so that they leave traces
along a shimmering collage
of fractured shells.
In hard-packed sand
their footprints are comma deep.
We are helpful. We shoe horses
and their feet
etch alphabets
in looser sand,
almost literate to a depth
of three inches.
We are engrossed, infer stories
as they enter water,
seaweed shackling
their hooves,
aquatic censorship,
though we see no traces,
and when they run free,
hock-high in foamy waves,
the garrulous surge of sea
added to theirs
make sagas,
scholarly tomes.
Observing them, we long
to scribble narratives
in lost planets,
galactic clusters,
probing deep space
with the point of our pen.
More at http://mariemacsweeney.com.