a question
I cannot answer.
I might ask the latest
brood of goslings
that appears with their parents
beside the lake.
(Pray I don’t startle them).
Or I could ask the double rainbow
high in the sky before it fades.
Or the disembodied voice
as it makes an emergency
announcement over the PA.
The student union is closing
early due to protesters
connecting their voices
to their bodies outside.
I’m afraid to ask the poets inside
who are allowed to keep reading
after the university locks
the bathroom doors. You know,
the ones—the poets who know how
to plant seeds of humanity
in the earth with their bare hands,
more lyrical than any trowel.
I should ask the scorched
and pungent-smelling prairie,
its soil blackened on purpose
to encourage it own native growth.
I would ask the red-winged blackbirds
that will reach the field soon,
ready to hunt for a new crop
of insects as it arises,
if I could. I can’t
ask the duff layer,
now burned off,
one more time before
I turn it over
to embrace the unidentifiable
hum vibrating deep within
the roots, growing louder and louder.
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Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 
Wow. I love this one. Spring on earth
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Thanks, Tom! It’s really here.
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Love this one, Amy! I see a parallel with the student protesters “connecting their voices to their bodies” (love!) and the implicit emergence of the cicadas. And of course, the poets are also connecting their voices to their bare hands. Wonderful!
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Thanks so much. I am intrigued by the cicadas you see (hear?) in the poem. The reader completes the poem. 😊
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I love that you didn’t necessarily intend them. To me, the image of the scorched prairie with its unidentifiable subterranean hum, the blackbirds on the ready, speaks of them. And this, in turn mirrors the emergent collective Voice of the protesters (while the poets seem to wield a greater power, that of life itself). There are so many layers to this piece.
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Thank you so much. I do love it when a poem takes off in directions I could not have imagined.
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