~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Iterations

It’s March on the bayou in Mobile;
outside my window
leathery live-oak leaves
flutter down like a spring snowfall,
forming a brown carpet;

daybreak in Alabama,
a symphony of harmony
as Langston described,
robins and cardinals flitting,
choirs of birds rejoicing
as a hopeful cat watches,

six water turtles aligned
on a half-submerged log,
azaleas in sunrise colors,
two ducks pecking in grass
for unsuspecting bugs,

those same bugs that tamper
with my garden and sadly
the ducks don’t like tiny snails
so those must be thwarted
and thus I am guilty
of snail murder.

Iterations of life and death,
linking of cycles
and wondrous E. O. Wilson’s
experimental epistemology;
consilience does not preclude
deviation or fragmentation

but when we forget
to see the whole of things
and how leaves and birds
and bugs need each other
and need rain and summer and winter,

we forget the opportunity
to be together in supportive peace:
tiny frogs in the jungle,
bears on the ice,
black and brown and east and west
and the more we become perverse
and favor one over the other,
vast fields of manufactured grain
loaded with poison to kill
all who would feed on it,
save the favored ones,
and how the bees do suffer;

hornets invading from exotic places
want to be triumphant too
but they cannot be allowed to win,
taxon cycles at work:
live oaks sprout new leaves
for summer shade;

how do we know the balance,
a celestial allotment
of ecological choices,
just enough, none wiped out
and none left solo
or we all die.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Daybreak in Alabama
E.O. Wilson (1929-), Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1998