Rebecca Drouilhet

By Rebecca Drouilhet
Picayune, MS, USA

Sometimes I still dream of those two old oaks on my grandparent’s old farm. Lightning hit one of them first and then years later, the other. They seemed to be potent symbols of my grandparents, who, ending their last days, were also ending the era of noble peasants tending rural farms. In this era of asphalt and progress, multi-lane highways dominate the landscape. Who remembers a barn full of half-wild kittens or bottle-feeding an orphan calf?

new subdivision…
a bulldozer buries
the last of the violets

vanishing wilderness…
beneath the pale moon
a snowy owl takes wing

forgetting who we are…
the cry of wild things
fading into silence

By Rebecca Drouilhet
Picayune, MS, USA

At midnight the little mouse lights a flickering candle and dips her heavy quill in ink. Outside her small hovel beneath a pallid moon the ocean is slowly dying. Even here, across a chasm too wide to cross, she can faintly hear the din of eight billion people roaring down ten-lane highways. But no one hears the mouse or heeds her warning. Words appear one by one, stark and black on the ivory parchment, only to fall like tears into an infinity where the ghosts of dead forests and dying shore birds flutter briefly and then plummet into the black hole of silence. The little mouse struggles on, writing against the tide, writing of glaciers and of melting ice, of dying animals, of droughts and heat and coming storms, until at last the candle sputters out.

a new dawn
and the earth goes on
without us…
snagged on a dead branch
a plastic bag snapping