Crows, Dead Moles, and Satan’s Toes
Chestnut Ridge
The light breaks through the trees
Golden
Illuminating.
But my thoughts are lost in
Crows,
Dead moles,
And
Satan’s toes.
Culture
A buzz saw
Shredding my thoughts
To pieces.
Is the crow evil
When it pecks out the eyes
Of a baby lamb
To feed their offspring?
Is the lamb good
When it is tortured to become veal
So that it may feed a Wall Street executive?
Nature
In its answers
Is complex.
Is the Wall Street executive evil
When it destroys an economy
To feed the mouths of trust fund babies?
Emphatically yes.
We are out of balance.
Work emails wrench me back into a fabricated reality.
They break the flow of my thoughts.
They ruin the flow of this poem.
I’m left to coordinate Covid notifications in the forest
Like a captured capitalist.
Does the land see me as a person
Trying to do good?
Or do they too see me as a colonizer?
The land is wise.
They see me as both.
The devil is the wild within and without us.
Lucifer brings the light through rebellion.
And Satan is just the adversary
To whom you give a lap dance.
Pick apart the threads
Woven by Christian culture
And everything starts to fall apart.
But decay is holy.
The old ways know this
And so did the early Christians with their saints.
They slowly picked apart the old stories
Made with vines and earth
And wove together new ones
With sinew and bone.
Were they evil
For picking apart the bodies of their holy ones
Like scavengers?
Like crows?
Are they evil
For praying at an altar
Filled with relics?
Heads, shoulders, knees, and toes.
Knees and toes
Of the dead.
I say this as someone
Who has prayed to the saints.
They do good
And clearly they do not mind
Their kneecaps being wrenched from their robed corpses
Dried tendons and cartilage
Bending and snapping apart.
What a complicated web of relationships
We weave together.
Despite how I seem,
I am not some font of infinite compassion.
I am no saint myself
Though I try to be.
I follow the water along the trail.
Over the centuries, it has quenched thirsts
And provided habitat
But in its endless search for balance,
It has brought down trees
And surely drowned many.
We should
If nothing else
Strive for
And to be in
Balance.
These woods
And the brief, fluttering flight of a crow
Beckon me to write.
Or,
At least,
Tap.
I could write a book here.
Maybe I should.
Or maybe I have.