Witness / 1
More majestic than any drone
is the eagle in its fixed flight
until the static of its repose
is shattered by a single
mouse, an answered
prayer.
Witness / 2
The world sleeps
as I walk to my monk’s cell.
Two raccoons, fat off the city
Gates built, growl from an autumnal
tree, dare me to abandon the pressed
flannel, the briefcase — scrap in the leaves
like Sid Vicious offspring
until I’m dead
to the envy
of gold.
Witness / 3
I eat wild blueberries
along an abandoned logging road
just off Highway 2 in the spirited
Cascades. I go off trail to climb the ridge
for a view of Frog Mountain, a view
of the black bear who grazes
in the valley below, a view
where I am trespasser, blueberry
bandit, surveyor of harmony
lost.
Witness / 4
The trees are so green-clad
the raindrops become emeralds
as they fall from a ghost of grey.
The moose, Nature’s bohemian,
unemployed, bellows
in a wealth-storm
of wonder.
I’m stunned in the comparison of a hovering drone versus the magic of an Eagle suspending itself in the wind. And in only two lines! Thank you.
I like the structure of the Witness poems here in that they all work together. The theme of contrasting an animal in its habitat with an unnatural intrusion weaves through them all as a complete set: eagle and drone, raccoons and businessman, bear and derelict logging camp. Witness 4 is more subtle with that theme but I think the inclusion of “unemployed” still provides that theme in an allusion. Yes, the moose is unemployed and that is its natural state, but in calling that out we can think about the absurdity of calling a moose unemployed and, by extension, what that says about us.
Hooray for foraging! Eagle, raccoon, moose, and and bear toil not, neither do they spin. (Sad for the mouse, though.) Blueberry-nibbling humans tiptoe into this pasture.
These make me think of this Wendell Berry quote from the introduction to his Sabbath poems, “The longer I have lived and worked here among the noncommercial creatures of the woods and fields, the less I have been able to conceive them as “wild.” They plainly go about their domestic lives, finding or making shelter… They are far better at domesticity than we industrial humans are. It became clear to me that they think of us as wild, and that they are right.”