we strew pieces of us
I see it near the trail’s fencerow.
Bright white lying against the lush greens of sumac and honeysuckle.
The white leather Nike looks brand new.
Bulky dad sole, ugly enough for a privileged tween to launch
unwanted into the scrub. Not in this poor county.
The shoe glares like a flare, bone white.
It’s too clean to have been left by floodwater.
Dropped here from a tornado?
Mud scoured by wind?
Bibles, wallets, photos,
tufts of pink insulation
found for a hundred miles.
It’s weird, wrong.
I stop walking.
But, I don’t move closer.
I can’t allow my eyes to look for a foot in the shoe, an ankle jutting out,
a body camouflaged in the Johnsongrass anymore than my mind can bear that
we created the horrors that strew pieces of us in fields and deserts all over this world.
The dog would know.
She’d alert me.
She’s confused at my stillness.
Wrens and robins drown a distant siren.
Above me, a confetti of barn swallows swoop and flit.
The dog knows the path; I let her lead me away.
2 thoughts on "we strew pieces of us"
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Details not on the news, raw emotion here. Nature moves on, adapts—human things impact forever—poems like this, tell all!
Such glorious details- you paint the scene wonderfully, and giving the dog and birds all the control at the end is a marvelous way of reminding us Nature is at the wheel, not humanity.