Easy, but hungry.
– James Galvin (“What Holds Them Apart”)
Perhaps the rodents first
showed us how to store wild grain,
woodpeckers: tools to improve.
Our larders volunteered
and we became farmers,
builders of things.
The hawk has it on easy-glide
parting grass with his eyes—
like a satellite in space, spying.
Or like sea gulls trailing fishing boats,
a flock of blackbirds rising and falling
around a boy breaking clods
behind the tractor and earth turned
in the vineyard—I wondered
how they knew, how they learned
to follow in the wake of progress,
of our proclaimed genius—
it was easy in those days.
