The Wonder
by Mark Robertson
Standing,
Trees, young and old,'
Share the soil from where
Out of, life is taken by the roots;
Each struggle a struggle
For the best of life,
While the rest, the weak, are
Squeezed out by the strong hoarders;
Everything all to their own
In darkness of worlds
That man can see not.
Too busy is he
Looking
At the leaves,
The flowers,
And the apple blossoms,
At the sunlight,
At the starry sky,
Up to the heavens,
Above the earth, in the air,
Where the birds fly
And only land to nest,
And feed,
And preen.
Ah, but there too
A bird threatens another,
Steals the newly made nest, evicts its three eggs;
Broken promises of spring
Litter the grass with fresh yoke;
Food for the ants.
The menacing mockingbird
Claims the new home,
The conquered chirps distressfully
In a neighboring tree.
Woe the vanquished!
Built the nest is not Rome,
Nor is the mockingbird Hannibal;
Just a bird,
Just a yard,
Near, where a boy
Plays in a loft,
Built himself to see afar
With his mechanical eye,
To pierce the distance . . .
He gazes to a horizon
Far beyond the bully and the bullied,
Oblivious to such triflings.
His eye is set on a man-made lake,
Filled with man-made boats
And all sorts of artifices
For the limbs of humans.
He whiles away the day,
Until hunger comes, and he
Puts down his mechanical eye,
And notices an ant
Carrying a leaf
Ten times its size.
There another, yet another!
Ants dismantling the tree,
Nay,
Only taking down the leaves.
The boy follows the trail,
The ant-made world,
To an ant-made mound
With tunnels and passages abound.
But he can't see inside,
Not even with his mechanical eye.
Yet he spots, instead, a dying sapling,
A small sproutling,
Hedged out by the mammoth beast
Beside it, a towering oak,
Sealing its insignificant fate:
Eternal darkness.
The boy departs,
Returns,
Saw in hand,
And he saws and saws
And saws: one branch,
Two branch, three.
Golden beams of light
Blast the young sapling
With promises for tomorrow's dawn.
And in the light
He spots a mottled egg,
Two broken beside it,
Yet one intact, and the boy
Looks above.
He spies in the nest
A different bird than yesterday;
Larger, meaner than the house sparrows.
And he stands there, wondering,
Standing straight, arms down,
Among the trees young and old
Who share the sky, and the trees
And the wilderness that is his yard,
And he wonders if there might be
A creature greater than he.
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