What Rough Beast | Poem for March 7, 2018

Some day soon a sound file on the Internet will be all that’s left
of the birdsong you hear outside the window. You’d like to tell
your great-grandchild about your mother, how she’d interpret
the calls of backyard birds: Wet here! Wet here! Wet wet wet!

but, context. She’ll ask what White Christmas means, like kids today
want to know why we say hang up the phone. Did you wear mittens,
grandma? Did you wear a toboggan hat? She’ll never see a brazen cloud
of monarch butterflies float up from a field of goldenrod,

nor know instinctively the meaning of the world flutter. A weightless white confetti
of mayflies, April showers that bring May flowers. Metallic tang of tasted snow.
In Spring, wildflowers grew where no one planted them—by the side of the road,
erupting of a sudden like an audience’s laughter. We can’t now count

what will be lost to her. One day she’ll want to know why we didn’t, why not after
the picture of the starving polar bear more hideous than a neglected hound,
bodies afloat facedown in the waters of New Orleans. While Alaskan towns pull back
like snarling lips over teeth, why not when penguins, what is

a bumble bee, what was it like to have seasons? Did you see the beaches, the great city
before its feet slipped and fell away? What is a sleigh? You’ll remember again the apple
trees, sprinkling pure white petals like snow around the abandoned house. How
when years later you drove by, both house and trees were gone.