Mother Nature is a bitch,
the kind that gently tongues each little pup all over,
like an overextended lover,
then eats the one or two
she thinks can’t make it through.
Here’s the rant. It’s
over young ideas
of how things should have gone.
Instead, it was the scalpel seams,
breathing machines,
and intake-output plastic hoses
in and out of noses
and other places no one naturally goes,
each smeared with iodine, sewn with a tight stitch,
and wires attached to everything between.
(All this had us pretty fried.
because, of course, you could have died.)
Natural nature isn’t fair.
trying to snatch you anywhere
else but here and now but for
some ambulance and heliport,
parades of people, including wife,
calling you back each day to life,
interstating back and forth
far south from even farther north.
Lines of people who couldn’t get in
betting on whether you’d lose or win
a home place sitting empty, warm
and helpers shoveling after the storm
and chickens laying a lonesome egg
(sometimes two, but who’s to beg
for more when all the hens know something’s off?)
and cat that hides then sneaks and stuffs
herself too full without enough
games to keep her occupied.
(Then there came that stretched and silly smile--
that photo of you sent round just in time.)
Mama Natura beat you up a bit
and you lay there and took the hit
smirking as if to advertise
you had ‘er by her velvet tongue
and with unnatural assistance,
proved it’s more about the persistence
humans use confronting dung--
collecting it to fertilize our paradise.
Everything is artifice, my friend,
as we persist from end to end.