You can know things
without the news telling you.
And you can stop protecting
the air, water, birds, insects. You can
just stop. You can stare into the eyes
of today’s injured screech owl, gathered up
by your neighbor, probably broken
wing. You can decide to never follow up
on this one bird, you can let the pipeline
bisect the wild, you can let the developers
line the ridge with inadequate housing
because can you really stop them
anyway? And at some point your own
spirit, the flickering flame in you
has had enough change, is full up
on climate news, won’t lift one more
plastic bottle out of the ditch. Sometimes,
we agree, we have to look away—to live—
we look away, or look at the flock
of American pelicans moving in unison
on the lake, one organism, and wonder aloud
what the word is for a collection
of pelicans. A fever? A braid of pelicans?
A woman on yesterday’s group hike
talked about the grief of tree-huggers,
of conservationists, the collective grief. I don’t
know what a group of pelicans is called in the books,
but today I saw pelicans, giant, improbable birds,
I lived to see this and they lived, are alive today,
swimming and flying. A tornado of pelicans.
A refresh or a healing of pelicans. A radiance.
The owl will be carried by volunteers
to a rehab, a place they run on a shoestring,
and chances are pretty good that owl
in my neighbor’s hand will later be healed
and released. One owl, all owls—what is a collection
of owls? It’s wisdom. It’s a wisdom of owls.
Some broken. Some repaired.
Some carried—when they cannot fly—
by the willingness of others.
This poem first appeared in Rise Up Review.
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Kelly Madigan is a poet and essayist living in the Loess Hills of western Iowa. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Distinguished Artist Award from the Nebraska Arts Council. Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, Terrain.org, Prairie Schooner, Flyway and Calyx. Her books include The Edge of Known Things (SFASU Press) and Getting Sober (McGraw-Hill).
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