Jasmine Armstrong
All Souls Day
The chill comes through the window with birdsong--
the notes of the yellow and black Townsend's Warbler
wearing his harlequin mask this Halloween
and I think in the midst of life, we are in death.
He flits between ochre leaves and candy wrappers left
by children who insist they were here--
Their marks made on the surface of a decomposing
time of humans, called Anthropocene--
the word calling to mind pigs, ever rooting among
waste in a trough, the peelings we gorge
cannot fill us. Or fly us to some new Eden.
Despite the superhero costumes we don,
the spirits of the earth we bow before in apology.