Pietà: The Morning Commute
The crisp Fall promised a winter of icy silver.
I drove the length of a grey morning highway
Frantic with quiet traffic.
Along the border, the rough, wind-ground stone
Faded into a sea of moving texture
Blurred by my speed.
My eyes rested on a patch of dry weeds
Dusted with an early snow.
The fume-tinctured wind
Hissed serpent-like through the swaying stalks,
My spinning tires crackling on the pavement.
There, in the nest of the high grass,
A newborn fawn, sticky and helpless, squirmed,
Its birth suspended by a sudden crack,
Its form protruding from a stopped birth canal,
The closing warning of a truck’s horn
Still buzzing against its shattered ear-bones.
In that instant I saw the universe,
Limp in the arms of its mother,
And I sped by, numbed, on my commute,
The morning radio droning on
About nothing at all.
