After: Air Raids on Kafr Dan & Refugee Camps near Bethlehem

It has already begun, the chord that will shiver glass. —Wm Stafford

Horizon-to-horizon demolition . . . I stop watching news
and walk out toward hills, thinking it may be better
to have lived when wars were fought on foot or horseback . . .
and not so far away children still played tag,
the apple harvest started.

I’ve turned more to books—Stafford, Berry, Yeats:
. . . the center cannot hold . . . rough beast slouching. . . .
Now comes a mending of my gloom and barren thoughts
while I hike among the trees. I’ve photographed white birch
lined up like choir rows in Oregon; seedlings thriving
out of cliffs near Banff, pushing through vast red-rock
reflecting heat near Burr Trail Road.

Perhaps it is a miracle I can still walk out
to thick-treed wilderness not far from home;
that my father taught beauty is essential as bread,
and other things peaceful, like camp where you can hear water.
That early on I heard the word wild in bewilder. . . .
My thriving times have been like trees flourishing
on the north slopes of hills behind the farm where I grew.
I have been a disciple of quaking aspen
and ponderosa, a fan of coyotes and crickets.
I wish such choices for all the shattering world.

Where I walk now in the dusk, soothing cricket-songs
stop when I stop. There’s tension in that silence . . .
as though only my moving on is acceptable, as though
staying quiet and blissfully bewildered
cannot be sustained.