Where are you from?

                                                         Photo by Avery Cocozziello
  

                                        After a bad night's sleep

                                        her accent betrayed her,

                                         a suspicious look thrown at her

                                        along with the dreaded question.

                                      Her identity is a construction

                                               of bits and pieces,

                                      a mosaic of memories and dreams

                                      that perish inside a question mark.

                                      She belongs to an outsider's land

                                          sheltered by her imagination.

Note: this poem was initially published in 2014 in an online journal called Black Mirror Magazine.

Moonbird

 

Photo by Chuck Homler.

Your life is made of distant springs and falls,

a straight route is not what you own,

for hurricanes and storms divert your path to new horizons.

Will you find horseshoe crab, mussels, clams on the stopovers?

Food awaits you

 if the shores are not ravaged by human greed.

Your resilience is written in B95's ordeal,

a mosaic of adventures ingrained in his own cells.

The threads of your trips assemble

the places of Mother Earth connected through their roles.

Nothing is detached in the collective harmony of souls.

Red knot shorebird, peaceful messenger,

icon of strength without rage,

your story is a universal flight of awareness 

waiting to be heard.

To learn about this issue I invite you to read this article published by NPR recently:

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/10/1180761446/coastal-biomedical-labs-are-bleeding-more-horseshoe-crabs-with-little-accountabi

The Language of Trees

 

 

Somebody asked me,

“What do you fear?”

The answer was very clear.

I responded I am afraid of boxes,

prisons of the mind

to prevent the sunlight from seeping in.

Boxes,

 like wells

where your legs caper to the music

somebody selected for you.

 

 

Boxes attached to labels and recipes,

sealed by experts,

delivered ready-made,

pretending they are made of iron

to resist the rain.

 

Boxes that refuse to understand the language of the trees.