Poem: In the Field

 

In the Field

 

twitches under jackstraw husks,

those fussy rodents,

hot-hearted voles,

 

it was hard

not to see them as fate-colored,

 

creeping as they were

in a cracked paisley

havocked by the retreat of frost.

 

yes, the green had begun to birth,

rending foams of dry needles,

pricking with its little feet.

 

there would be butterflies,

those standard-bearers

for hysterias of pollen.

 

the vole-hearts 

would feed the oil-soft, yellow-striped bellies of snakes.

 

this was god’s parchment, the field:

this official yet tattered scroll,

flip-flopping with its decrees.

 

there would be plump berries,

then sturdy ladders of ice,

both of them nurtured

then assassinated.

 

and always the battling hungers,

nature’s toilsome bane of judgments,

the owl-neck twists.

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Why do humans go to war?  Because nature linked hunger, pain, and emotion to performance and, furthermore, made trust almost impossible, not without force.