in the midst of it all

there is a bird that has died and a tree mourns
the loss of another fateful tenant a hundred
year history etched into her lonely branches
some say if you read the rings of a tree you can
moonwalk through time with your fingertips how
it whirls around the grained flesh all while we
fashioned war and carved the world with it,
poisoned the ocean in the name of mud

in the midst of it all               there is

life that leads peacefully without regrets falls into
the churning cycle of life disappearing to the sound
of ameen in the way that the soil cuddles up against
tree roots and murmurs thank you to her Creator for
such a majestic, ancient neighbor younger still
than the dirt herself made up of old bodies
decomposed birds and men and small things rotted
into dust like crushed shells and gold and diamonds all
tucked beneath the solemn skin of the earth and yet

in the midst of it all

there are subway lines beneath the city and
they say we buried a whole river cast bodies down in
ditches and barely covered them dug up graves and
holy sites but there are also stars above them that
praise God’s name and that welcomed a prophet, split
themselves only in divine order and wait ever patiently
still, as we try and harness the moon and assault the sky
to land on mars or jupiter and call it magic coat the
horizon in our soot-filled exhales of defeat each time

while,              in the midst of it all,

there is an ant that keeps on making its soft pilgrimage
back home without the need to transgress another’s honored
station the bees keep in line and die because of it the wind
blows through the suburbs and the desert and places that
have been unmarked by human blood the way the ground
once sat for millennia and

here we are

prayer long dried from our lips, stumbling through space,
racing past poems and missing miracles, chasing after things
that have been cursed from the day satan first birthed them
on his long slow tumble from heaven and

worshiping them instead.