Border Babies
She is crying for her mother
The rictus of an existential grief
Pulling her face into contortions
In a tragedy of tears
Tiny toddler arms stretched wide
And shaking…
How can Lindsey Graham
See this child in pain
and feel afraid –
Not FOR her,
But FROM her,
Only
Because
Of
Her beautiful
Brown
Skin
Spring Equinox
I was remembering today
Walking in the Equinox air between the fences
Everywhere
The blinding bright sun shining
Into my old eyes
Looking in the woods beyond the barbed wire
Split so that I felt my life in two places
Once I ushered a biologist to visit
A massive broken oak, another woods
Another time
As her many daughters
Green and graceful
Held the Earth around us
In silence and in hope, we all of us
Some twisty gnarl of law we knew to still the big machines
From bringing down a sufficiently
Ancient tree
The question put and bark and bulk answering back –
No, not 400 years, though surely
Maybe, it could be 250
No way to know for sure, until
Her shattered body reveals her truth with an end
And then,
It is just data and too late
So many stipulations to compassion
When every acorn holds the antidote to human hubris and destruction
In the possibility of awe –
And then here again,
In this time viewing
These easy thousand trees holding the earth along the hills
So many answers to what ails us
In any place at all it seems
Like air within us and around us
But so rarely on our mind