Ode to History
Campbell McGrath
At the crossroads
I am lost
and pull the car over and get out.
Farms as far as the eye can see,
fields of vegetables in brilliant sunlight.
No matter how hard I try
I will never create anything as beautiful as this
ripple of water
cupped in a purple cabbage leaf.
Hidden in the ditch
is a puddle
full of ducklings—fourteen
or fifteen of them
surrounding their wide-eyed mother,
while yards away,
motionless and imperturbable, stands
the great blue heron
that would snatch them
in an instant.
Always the same question,
an equation
of what is and what may be against
what has been lost—is it
worth the cost,
will it be, how could it ever not be?
Documents, maps
imbued with ancient ink, chronicles
and archives—the past
is paper
and the present, a match igniting
what fires will come.
