“After John Muir”
“Today’s news is this:
the amphibians are vanishing.
Rice paddie and stomach brooding frogs, gone.
Glass frog, rain frog, golden toad,
Corroboree, toadlet, gone. Yosemite toad.
Tiger salamander, spade foot.
Bufo bufo, so called ‘common toad.’
Cascades, Tara humare, Goliath,
Medusa excellus.
It is as if we woke up one morning
and found our mouths missing,
the small wet we relied upon
with inattention.
It is a dream of a world without lily pads
no tadpoles absorbing tails
no eyes afloat on placid ponds.
No witnesses.
But this is for real:
a world without the single strand
of tapioca eggs
chaining from the underside
of a rare green leaf:
this precarious
this brilliant
this so perfect
as to seem inevitable.”
– Gerry Gomez Pearlberg
(I found this poem in the novel, “From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun,” by Jacqueline Woodson. It’s very good, too. — Ms. Nancy)
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