Darius Degher’s poems have appeared in various American and European literary magazines, including Measure, Think, Agen
The Little Things
Here come the ants and mosquitoes again
making their living as best as they can
oblivious to all the discomfort they cause.
But she knows they’re an integral part of it all.
When was the last time she slaughtered a spider?
Oh yeah, that black widow on the patio chair.
And yes, she apologized to the poor thing
explaining that her little girl might sit there.
And let’s not forget that black widows
do sometimes devour their mates after sex.
If anyone would understand, then it’s her.
In her comfy condo Joy has to take pause.
She wonders if we’re just too soft in our ways,
too separate from nature and farming and death,
the lifestyle her grandma accepted and loved.
But that was back when there was no other way,
while now we have choices, like doing no harm.
Now killing is optional, there on the menu
of moral decisions we all get to make.
She thinks of that Indian sect, yes the Jain,
who brush off the surfaces when they sit down
to save any lives that are living on there.
And while it’s impractical she knows it’s right.
And so Joy determines to become a vegan,
to sever the link in the slaughterhouse chain
of feed-lots and killing and deforestation.
That night she’s with friends in a bistro downtown
and can’t help but notice that every damned dish
features body bits grilled or sauteed temptingly.
And what will she do with those four pounds of hamburger
there in the freezer already quite dead?
So, after defrosting it she fries it up
and saves it in portions for God, her black lab.
(Yeah, she loves to call him and freak out the dog park.)
He’s not a vegan and comes from a long line
of scavengers huddled in caves with Neanderthals,
bred to assist in the hunting of wildebeests
or whatever they chased down for protein back then.
Now she can claim greater distance from that
but knows she’ll arrive at a balance one day,
keeping what’s needed and ditching the rest,
living her life in the spaces between.
And So I Break
I gather in the reaches of the south,
somewhere down under or Tahiti way.
A tempest of sustained and blasting winds
has pushed the ocean waters deep and wide,
so deep they drag across the ocean floor.
A ground swell scraping seabed sand, I come.
With surface seas of some odd forty feet
I travel far, unstoppable, you see,
lifting freighters and aircraft carriers
then easing them back downward into troughs.
The forerunners, my progeny, are off
to batter coasts and islands on the way.
I hear the blue whales call from miles apart,
through me, to echolocate family.
The water that composes me, the drops
and droplets, separate but also one,
are held together by the hydrogen-
to-oxygen electrostatic glue
that’s swirling in this surface-tension mass
and moving me along as something new.
I’m just one of countless ocean swells
that came before and will forever come,
that make the waves and run with tides in seas
that link to all the waters of the earth
in clouds and rain and snowfall feeding flows
of glaciers, icecaps, rivers, lakes and streams.
But anyway, as I approach the continent
I mount the waiting shelf, now finally free.
I’m powerful and fragile as I rage,
as reef and beach become a welcome mat
reminding me that as I live I die,
both states existing all at once the same.
I rise up with a rearing godhead face
of green and blue, my now immaculate
design too perfect for the fittest to survive.
And so . . . I break.