Copyright 2023 James C Horner

Reader of the Future,

Is your climate flooding there?

Are you free from care?

Beyond this greening pond

I am writing for a spring I will never see.

I am writing for someone I will never meet.

And something that never before existed, I mother .

 

Wood ducks go wooo–eeek!

One flies into a woodpecker’s silent hole.

Fourteen eggs she lays, broods.

Ducklings hatch,

with sharp claws cling,

with stiff tails brace,

to the entrance climb,

follow their abandoning mother.

Thirty feet up

they step out,

plunge with outstretched fuzzy wings,

bounce on leaves, slip into the pond,

smell their inseparable bond.

 

You, my sniffers, might leap out of your trees,

follow the scent of my poems

past present danger,

or just find a place with more space than an overcrowded tree cavity.

 

I am that mother floating through the air,

scurrying toward the pond.

Will you, my readers, jump? Then swim for your lives?