Crises of Nature

These poems continue my exploration of Krisis for the dVerse Poets Pub anthology call. It’s the last Open Link Night before the deadline, and we were given the opportunity to present up to three poems for this post. I’ve come up with two offerings.

Betrayal By Nature

“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”~William Wordsworth

But the nest beneath my window:
How I loved watching the mother wren
her body filling the space
over her little spotted eggs;
the ugly blue eye-bulbs of the featherless
chicks after they pecked themselves free
of their cracked shells;
and the gory gobbling of worms.
Nature isn’t always pretty.

I watched them every day
from my office window
quiet and careful not to upset
our tentative relationship
of actors and audience.
We had an understanding
an implicit contract of trust:
I would cause no harm
and in return I could observe
this miracle of life and growth.
I knew it wouldn’t be long
before they flew away, but
if you love, you set your baby
birds free to fly, that’s part
of the deal.

But one morning, they were gone
along with half the nest.
I went outside and found
one baby’s body below the bush.
Another had been dragged to the yard.
The others I assumed gobbled
by a crow or raccoon in the night.
So cruel.

Now I shoo away any bird
that flits into the bush
beneath my window.
I remove any gathering materials
that could begin a nest.

Permanent Crisis

“If you look at books written in this period, one of the most popular words for titles was crisis.”~Professor Steven Gimbel

He says the industrial revolution
brought on a flurry of books
with crisis in their titles
but I can’t find them.
The Library of Congress offers:
The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick,
Jane Eyre, The Red Badge of Courage,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little Women
the required reading of my youth
full of human crises: disease,
death, war, adultery, slavery, equality,
obsession, mental-illness, but
not one with the word crisis
in the title.

He says there was a sense
that humanity itself was at a crossroads:
people moving from farms
to urban settings were alone
but never alone. They could never
have imagined today’s traffic
cameras and doorbell cameras
hand-held devices taking video
and pin-pointing the precise location
of each one with a Global Positioning
System of satellites.
Billions of humans staring at screens
so alone but never alone.

I search for book titles from this year
and find the word crisis everywhere:
2025: Constitutional Crisis;
Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis;
The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future;
Crisis Communications: and the Art of Making Nothing Happen
And why not? Being human is
being in crisis. Our brains are
pattern machines, creating short-cuts
and habits, producing pleasure
to drive us toward predictability
and delivering discomfort
to coax us from the unknown.

But the only constant in life is change:
the next shoe is always dropping—
somehow in threes, though we
remove them in pairs.
Each new wrinkle will come
forming deeper valleys
the more we smile.