I read Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?
A moving portrait of Batman’s death—in the context of his life.
And then I began to hear about the death of bats:
White-nose syndrome is killing the bats of New York,
A fatal fungus, spreading to worldwide populations,
No scientific explanation, nothing that could save them,
These useful predators of the bugs who’d swallow us alive,
The bugs who, as I’ve always seen it, are humanity’s most resilient enemy,
Our fated opponent in a future battle for the Earth.
Bats carry hints of the grave already in some minds:
The vampire, the children of the night:
But I love the night and its children.
I’ve rescued spiders since childhood introduced Charlotte;
I’ve loved owls since those long nights in our Kentucky home,
Those lonely calls outside my window on cold, dark nights.
Black cats? My favorite of all.
And yet, the way owls eat has always disturbed me.
When does consciousness stop when you’re gobbled up?
An owl can take a cat, pluck it right from the ground,
Silently except for the scream of the cat.
Somewhere inside the heart stops, the brain suffocates
and dies, the liver and muscles support the life
of another being, the compact mass of bones
crushed to a ball, neat as stones in a graveyard.
I do not know what the owl thinks about all this.
Might it wonder at the screams
of field mice clutched in talons,
swallow them quick to avoid
all that anguish? Does the death that sustains it
Prey on the mind of an owl with the philosophical heaviness
of a vegetarian forced to turn to meat to survive
or a pacifist turned soldier?
Owls are synonymous with night, much like bats,
and yet they don’t strike terror into many hearts,
or not the same kind.
A bat might avoid
A human scream with the same petrified aversion
That makes us duck: and yet, these bats are so cute,
Little voyagers in the night who help us swim,
Darting randomly down with tiny squeaks to clear space
For us to breathe through the night’s blanket of bugs
Which the diminished number of lake fish can’t gobble fast enough.
When night nears and we’re still playing badminton,
The bats fake us out, darting overhead through twilight,
While we race to meet an oncoming birdie
That isn’t there: “You tricked us, bats!”
Chuckling mingling with their cheeping
In our shared joke.
Those years at the lake without bats
Felt like our feared future without bees: we were scared, this homestead lake
Our microcosm on the world. Like the year we battled the lake’s invasion
By gypsy moth caterpillars, trying to save our crabapple tree (and lost),
Or the onset of invasive zebra muscles dominating the lake,
So prevalent now we wear lake shoes to swim, where once we ran out barefoot
Into the water over smooth, flat stones.
Or, two years ago, the flesh-eating algae that infested a Finger Lake near ours,
A false alert about Keuka keeping us out of the water for two days
Before we decided those once-a-year swims were worth the risk.
All signs of a fearful future, results of human wrongs.
But where are our beloved bats? We look for them each year:
The friendly, martin-shaped swallows of the dusk
Darting amongst us, and high up into the trees,
As friendly as the seagulls who formed a funnel around me
Or swooped close enough to brush Mom while she fed them, with her own
Seagull cries. I fear the death of bats
Like the destruction of our beautiful lake.
Our lovely planet.
But this year, finally, another bat dips low,
A kiss of wind on my cheek, a slight touch in my hair.
I don’t run screaming like the girls in TV sitcoms.
I call out with soft joy: “Bats! You’re back! Welcome home!”
—
Adele Gardner (they/them) has a poetry collection, Muse Mansion, forthcoming from San Francisco Bay Press; another, Halloween Hearts, released by Jackanapes Press; and over 500 stories, poems, art, and articles published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, American Arts Quarterly, The Cape Rock, and more. Twelve poems won or placed in the Poetry Society of Virginia Awards, Rhysling Award, and Balticon Poetry Contest.
