Earlier each day comes the light

and our appetite, the terror that we are,

shines darkly in every living thing.

 

 

The drought intensifies, its yammer

wilder, more dimensionless: no one

is listening and everything

 

 

is listened to: each keystroke, every flutter

in the grid. Our confected optimism and

our medicated sleep.

 

 

What is it that we have not seen

and think we can in this way see

—our innocence? the cartoon

 

 

of our harmlessness? how hard we tried?

Invisible, the benediction of the alders,

their sprightly shade.

 

 

In the shallows, thought

unfurls itself: dazed, sunburnt,

querulous. What does it want?

 

 

Fat. Sugar. The world’s neck

motionless beneath its foot. It wants

to understand. But everywhere

 

 

the glare of meaning’s absence.

Gunfire’s distant thud and clack.

The rain that never comes.

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Jan Zwicky is the author of The Experience of Meaning, The Long Walk, Wisdom & Metaphor, Forge, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, and many others.