A Magical Realism Ecology Poem Lavendra Copen

Let’s imagine the bullet misses this time, shatters rock instead of rib. Let’s imagine the pronghorn leaps away, lives to love another day, and pronks in celebration when his youngsters sprout their horn buds.

And let’s imagine the coyote doesn’t eat the poisoned hawk who ate the poisoned mouse who ate the poisoned grain. Just this once there’s some divine intervention — a hail storm, maybe, lightning — and she stays in her den, curling like a crescent moon around her hungry pups.

Let’s say, just this once, the duck doesn’t swallow the lead shot for his gullet, to grind up corn and snails, but picks a granite pebble tumbled for ions to just the right size. And a pine branch weakened by the wind falls across the steel-jawed trap and springs it just before the fox pair flow like amber tributaries down to the river to drink.

Let’s pretend that water still leaps to sun-shot freedom over beaver dams; that air explodes when a falcon stoops on a pigeon, when an eagle hits a snow goose, and all its feathers go incandescent.

Let’s pretend it’s all still there, the sweetness, the antique violence.

human destiny, waiting to be manifested.

Say we pin that photograph of Earth From Space up on our walls. Sure, it’s risky. Get far enough away, and otters gliding like sable sunlight down a snow bank disappear. Valleys shrink to rumpled creases. Even mountains are only a string of snowy pearls, and all those bands of old-growth forest look like so much human destiny, waiting to be manifested.

But in hope, let’s imagine someone takes a zoo-born baby condor, holds her up to the sky she was born to: an offering. Says her name three times to stars: a manifesto. Say we finally look down deep inside the kestrel’s eye, past amber and earth brown and into black, where the spirits of the planet and oblivion lie, stretched out side by side, hand in talon.