Instead of God, who is probably there, but
cast your eye on the shoreline at Lake Calumet
and a black-crowned night heron striding across a muddy inlet
where chromium, copper, zinc, cadmium, and lead—
elements of God’s mineral wealth—no longer congregate
in numbers too great to be good.
Witness its solitary elegance, stalking snakes
in shallow waters restored to life
and deaths more wholesome than poisoning:
demise by gulls and avian rivals
and mammals who aren’t us this time
and nest failure (who among us hasn’t shuddered to think
of mistakes we’ve survived that others have not?)
and at last, old age. Ask all the chirruping industry why,
its reply no more brutal than God’s stubborn silence
and pretty, at least, under the deepening sky.
—Sheri Reda works as a writer, presenter, performer, and the founder of Flow and Moment, LLC. Her poems have appeared in the award-winning Dear Human, published by Paloma Press, The Healer’s Burden, published by University of Iowa Press, and in Eocene, The Examined Life, HQ Quarterly, Hay(na)Ku, Galatea Resurrects, and other journals. Her stories have appeared most recently in anthologies by Chicago Story Press. Her chapbook entitled Stubborn is available through Moria Press.
