On these acres, there’s a harshness I didn’t expect,
nothing like I’d known in the city. Here, the wilding
woods show me what I can and can’t control:
The fire ants mound up their defenses,
pushing up the red earth, then choking the life
out of the prairie grass, the zinnias, my view.
On my neighbor’s property, the leaf-cutter ants
can chew all the trees as fast as a logging crew
with their John Deeres chugging and wrecking.
Look at those towering pines that can topple
onto my small house. I’m fast friends now
with the arborists who cut and saw and trim.
You should’ve seen that tiny copperhead
my dog found in the yard yesterday. I watched,
shocked, terrified by the snake’s pure audacity
while my pup, who thought it amusing, shook it,
breaking its spine—and I didn’t mind—I scooped up
its corpse with a shovel and hurled it into the woods.
I marvel at this severity in nature—how it seems
as necessary its beauty. Even the bijou beetle,
a jewel, can lay waste to a grove of trees,
boring into the heartwood, eventually killing
its food source. It’s treacherous but so gorgeous
as it glints blue and green in the sunlight.
—
Rebecca A. Spears, author of Brook the Divide (Unsolicited Press) and The Bright Obvious (Finishing Line Press), has her poems, essays, and reviews included in TriQuarterly, Calyx, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Verse Daily, Ars Medica, Field Notes, and other journals and anthologies. She has received awards from the Taos Writers Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, Porches Writing Retreat, and Dairy Hollow House. Brook the Divide was shortlisted for Best First Book of Poetry (Texas Institute of Letters).
