I wasn’t going to post this poem I wrote yesterday in response to This Photo Wants to be a Poem, but Margaret posted her poem “Road Construction,” so here I am in solidarity.
I am conflicted by what it means to be human. Some days more than others, but this month is one of those days. And wouldn’t you know it, my poem of the day today from Jane Hirshfield is “Let Them Not Say,” which just serves to reinforce these feelings. I am also listening the The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green which probably fuels this conflict as well. Not probably, certainly.
We have done so much harm, and yet we do so much good.
We kill and kill and kill, and yet there are five no longer invisibly small black swallowtail caterpillars sprinkling frass on our kitchen table from atop the fennel in the drinking glass.
We break so much, and yet we can dedicate ourselves to repair, and gather around picnic tables in a community garden to form a mending circle so we can repair beloved articles of clothing and dream other forms of repair into being.
I am an animal, an omnivore, and therefore other plants and animals have died so that I can live.
I know that our oak and our neighbors’ oaks send way more acorns out into the world than could ever possibly survive (even if this were a forest and not a neighborhood). I do not mourn all the possible oak trees that were eaten by squirrels and deer or that fell on pavement and rolled away down the street. But I do mourn the ones whose brief lives I ended with my weeding fork.
What to do about this existential conundrum? I guess the only thing to do is to go on. And to do the best we can in spite of what we, as an individual and as a species, are and have been. Do the best we can do. Which Kate DiCamillo would say is to have a “capacious heart.”
Michelle has a capaciously generous Poetry Friday roundup post that is bound to fill you with way more hope and joy than mine!
(the photo is via Wikimedia)
A(nother) Year of Reading 
