Poem #21: The Distancing

Taking evening strolls on treadmills
in living rooms across America
while watching Nature on TVs
and out the windows. Children,
in other rooms, playing at sports
with their hands and a big screen.
Disguising, seasonally, the shrubbery
with synthetic eggs, spider webs,
neon flowers, and perma-green
garlands, forgetting anything was
underneath. Buying vegetables scrubbed
clean, meat processed, preserved,
and packaged with no hint of animals
or soils. Grimacing at the country girl
who picked a berry from a bush
and popped it right into her mouth.
Taking pilgrimages to spots once known
for natural wonders now transformed
into crowded sprawling meccas
of stuff to entertain and stuff to buy:
souvenirs, outlets, wedding chapels,
anti-gravity, aquariums, I-max, fudge.
Believe it or not, forgetting to look
at the mountain range, the canyons,
or the ocean between handing over
credit cards and getting receipts.
Forgetting planting, picking, weaving,
hunting, slaughtering, losing pathways,
combinations for tools, recipes for cures.
Youth turning into adults without knowing
how to de-bone a chicken or plant
a garden. Evolution. Growing more
and more allergic to the outdoors—
the grass, the trees, the pollen from bees,
the mildew, the mold, the animals.
Yet in childbirth—less distancing—
even the sanitized, anesthetized versions.
But the doubt, the wondering, could a child
survive, even thrive, otherwise?
Remembering, the once upon a times,
in some other world, when a woman squatted
and moaned, grunted like the animals
around her, with sky and stars faithfully
above, as she brought forth a newborn
into hay who took a breath of oxygen
from the world, giving it hope in return.