A fox slinks by the roadside,
her kits tucked in the brambles,
knowing hunger, yes,
and maybe cunning,
but not envy, not shame.
A hawk snatches the slowest sparrow—
there’s no malice in her talons,
no market built
on the feathers of the fallen.
Yet we,
lords of opposable thumbs,
make of survival
an artful cruelty.
We build walls not just to keep wolves out
but to lock neighbors away.
We take more than hunger asks,
feed on fear,
turn bread into weapon,
give names to the other and write them in blood.
No deer ever sharpened a coin
to divide a meadow,
no rabbit forced her kin
to dig a ditch for a king’s gold.
Only we count our worth
in acres and gods,
only we sing hymns
as we torch another village.
Yet—
watch us cradle the smallest hurt:
a man lifting a child from floodwater,
a woman weaving a blanket
from her only thread.
See how we hold funerals
for the fallen dog,
write elegies for whales,
weep for the forests we destroy,
curse ourselves for loving
what we later leave in ruin.
Animals love without irony—
they lick their wounds,
nuzzle the newborn,
turn their backs and are gone.
They do not write sonnets,
do not burn books,
do not build cathedrals
only to close the doors.
But only we
see a stranger’s hunger
and name it our own.
Only we,
who have walked in violence,
also walk in forgiveness.
We are the worst:
greedy, vengeful, forgetful—
capable of atrocity
even against our own kind.
But we are also the best:
capable of mercy,
of poetry,
of laying down the sword
to plant something green
where nothing grew before.
What a strange thing it is,
to be human—
to carry both plague and promise,
the fox’s cunning
and the dove’s return,
to be both the flame and the hand
that snuffs it out.
We are the trouble
and the tenderness.
We are the wound
and the healing.
Perhaps that is why the world
keeps spinning us onward—
because nowhere else
has nature made
such a dangerous,
such a dazzling,
mistake.
