We include you in our unconventional feast,
Honor your life with family gathered,
Pray that our pale and voracious species
Does not wipe out yours.
***
Oh rainbow slicked scales shimmering beneath ripples.
Oh mighty ones returning home,
Pumping, pressing, and heaving your bodies
Through ocean riptides, up rapids, over river rocks—
May you find the calm eddy, the redds with clean
Gravel and gently swirling water.
May your nest of orange eggs, tiny treasures, lie
Undisturbed, and may the mightiest male
Hovering nearby, gift his milt, and you multiply.
***
Once, a nose-holding stench,
A cacophonous stream of eagles and crows
Circling carcass-lined water,
Led us to witness an aftermath.
This was not a traffic jam at a dam’s
Fish ladder, not a slaughter by sea lions
As salmon waited in scores for passage.
What would it be like to die like this,
In congregation, after giving life
To the next generation?
***
When we walk the trail from Puget Sound
Through Douglas fir and sword fern forest,
Along Carkeek Creek, mirroring their homeward
Trek, can we refrain from anything, but awe?
—
Suzanne Edison’s book, Since the House Is Burning, by MoonPath Press was published in 2022. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Her poetry can be found in The Missouri Review, SWWIM, Solstice Literary Magazine, RockPaperPoem, Whale Road Review, Lily Poetry Review, JAMA, and elsewhere. She teaches expressive writing to caregivers through UCSF Wellness Center for Youth with Chronic Conditions and lives in Seattle.
