Slow News
       

These are momentary sensations, the wild, the windswept.
I am a prairie, a mountain, a hurricane, et cetera.
The sun sinks, but only appears to. The same is true of failure's
             rejoining effect, how it finds, or maybe is, a sinkhole
             in which we burrow and feel, finally, at home with who we are.
You are nothing, like me. See: we are in it together.
The yellow jacket is easily mistaken for a honeybee. Still,
             it matters that venoms are extractable.
Pain shrinks the world to size. Even the yellow jackets
             take awhile to accept a change in circumstance.
But they do. They do because the nest is all. If not this one
             then the next. Consider the colony, the larvae.
I am a wasp, a hornet, a polliwog.
The mother tongue, once bilged, spills its nouns and closes
             its vowels. We are obliged to adapt.
It's okay to say the sun rises. To compare yourself
             to what at any given moment helps you get on.
Strength is the illusion. Survival the comedy.
I drink hot coffee in the noontime sun and feel like my father.

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Copyright © 2014 John Estes All rights reserved
from The Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission