A Life

She was well over one-hundred yet still vibrant in spirit.
Only last autumn I saw her clutching helium-filled balloons and slow dancing alone.

Not one to travel, she loved to hear tales of her many colorful visitors,
Especially those avant-garde transients who wintered in the tropics because they could.

For most of her life she maintained ribald affairs with several others in the neighborhood.
Her Paphian trysts resulted in a number of offspring, but few could survive in that environment.

Bawdy reputation aside (and we're talking consenting adults here),
She was always first to grant succor to generations of the needy in the form of room and board.

Deathly afraid of thunder and lightning as if burdened with withering premonitions,
She died in a spring storm after a lengthy decline.

Venerable old girl that she was, alembic in essence,
Come winter I'll be forwarding her piece by piece up the chimney to a Druid-filled Heaven.

Descent

I was a passenger pigeon for a half million years
Until they came to the roosts at night with fire and clubs.

I was a seasoned forest for 12,000 years after the ice
Until I felt the rake of the saw.

I was a river that you would know for 10,000 years
Until dams choked my flow.

I was a prairie of tall grasses for 8,000 years
Until I heard the hissing iron of the plow.

Now I am a lone gray wolf,
A senescent redwood,
A drifting monarch butterfly,

And in time I will become a man.

Cicadas

They are up to something in all that darkness.

You can't tell me they just sit there underground for 17 years sipping xylem
On the roots of my white oak trees.

Synchronous wiggling and squirming by a few billion nymphs
Like cow flatulence may very well be heating up this planet.

Maybe they burrow all the way through to the antipode in Chengdu, China
And sing threnodies to the mayor accompanied by reed pipes and gourd drums.

Perhaps they behave as do the majority of blue jays
And spend a lot of time gossiping with the devil on Fridays.

Could it be that they are the shape-shifters of Class Insecta
And sometimes become the night-crawlers that catfish die for?

As for those annoying Oklahoma earthquakes,
Consider mischievous locusts instead of that harmless fracking.

And those screams that I attribute to wet swamp owls,
Well these bugs could reach those decibels and skip choir practice.

They are up to something in all that darkness.