By Isabel Rogers
The parrot, Einstein of birds, who can count
and reason calmly in our tongue
while outliving us, disdains the ostrich.
For all its sprint records,
the ostrich will be remembered
for hiding from the truth.
You can’t outrun stupid.
We the people hold some truths
to be self-evident: our magnificent brain
in a body that can’t flee, can’t smell fear,
can’t hear death, can’t see straight.
Even so, our retinas, with rods and cones
as intricate as any telescope array,
evolved to see a predator
slide out of oblique shadow
and give us time to bolt.
We survey our closed dominion
until we look up in August
to find comet dust flaring in the night.
This vastness, this vertiginous awareness
mocking gravity on our speck of now,
wakes us with a recalibrating jolt.
But soon our familiar star will claw toward us
in seven-league boots from the east,
drawing its Valium thread across our planet
as if to cloak a birdcage
to muffle questions that blink through dark matter
and would pour over us
until we drowned, dreaming of amnesia.
Poet Bio
More Poems about Living
Meanwhile
From the Sky
When I die,
bury me in the sky—
no one is fighting over it.
Children are playing soccer
with empty bomb shells
(from the sky I can see them).
A grandmother is baking
her Eid makroota and mamoul
(from the sky I can taste them).
Teens are writing love...
More Poems about Nature
Listening in Deep Space
We've always been out looking for answers,
telling stories about ourselves,
searching for connection, choosing
to send out Stravinsky and whale song,
which, in translation, might very well be
our undoing instead of a welcome.
We launch satellites, probes, telescopes
unfolding like origami, navigating
geomagnetic storms, major disruptions.
Rovers...
At the Equinox
The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars.
I have no theory of radiance,
but after rain evaporates
off pine needles, the needles glisten.
In the courtyard, we spot the rising shell of a moon,
and,...