A Poem by John Lee
As I crawled through the tall
grass of grief I saw so many
interesting and disquieting things.
The priest asks us to bend our knees
and pray but doesn’t he mean crawl?
Crawling makes us indistinguishable
from nearly eight or ninety percent of life.
Ants crawled right by me yesterday
on their way to work.
Ants don’t take off Christmas Day
anymore; they used to when they were pagans.
Beetles crawled over me as I
wept my way through the tall grass of grief.
I heard one say “that is the first human
I’ve seen here in a long time.”
“Yeah,” said his partner, or wife, or son.
It is hard to tell who is whom in the beetle world.
“Most just go down as far as a bending
knee asking the new God to bring back whatever was lost.”