Hunger and Light

A Sunday Poem

Dear friends,

I am still working on my memoir, slowly, slowly in these busy summer days. But as I pause between chapters, I find that poetry keeps coming to visit- when I am cleaning, when I am sitting at children’s birthday parties trying to act like a person who wouldn’t rather be anywhere else, when I am standing next to the river, when I am crying over an image in my newsfeed, when I am woken every day in the early morning darkness by the same robin who is trying to find a mate with admirable persistence.

This is the one that showed up in bits and pieces this week, even as I battled the stomach flu and fever dreams. Maybe because I battled the stomach flu and fever dreams. ;)

Happy Sunday,

Kendall

Hunger and Light

They told me to be wary of beauty.

They told me to look

for the dark lurking beneath the light.

But I thought— no, that can’t be right.

Because once, I gazed

into the obsidian eye of a sand tiger shark

and I felt no fear,

only something like stillness.

…

They told me a story meant to unsettle me—

they said that in utero, the largest baby tiger shark

becomes a cannibal,

eating all of its fetal siblings

before emerging the victor.

They told me this as proof that the natural world

is in the grips of something

sinister and evil.

…

But they didn’t tell me about

how this shark—

she hovers.

They didn’t see the way she floated just above the seafloor,

the light tracing a silent melody on her back.

They didn’t think to guess what she was feeling,

as she and her kin glided through the night

side by side

like moons caught in the orbiting tide.

…

Not all lives that begin in violence

carry on that way.

…

And anyway, who are we to say that a shark pup is evil,

just because she slipped smoothly from the belly of her mother

with a belly full of her brothers?

…

Maybe she was just hungry.

…

I will tell you about how

her mother chose her father

deliberately

because he bumped her without demand,

stilling her solitude,

a liquid note drawn out between the bars.

Only later— sensing the sweet pulse of life within her—

would she endure the advances of lesser suitors

in order to produce inferior offspring to feed their daughter.

…

What I mean is, she loves in her own way.

What I mean is, all life begins in death,

even when we fail to see it.

What I mean is, we cannot understand

another’s hunger

until we stop and watch the light dance on

their skin in the darkness.

Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash