The Time Given Us

by Gwen Carlson

What if there is no leaf-littered path
through the woodlands to travel.
What if the birds are silent,
the skies are smogged, and the
road from home that goes ever on and on
is an interstate, slick and roaring. Should we
still take our old walking sticks and go adventuring?  If
there are no hard choices anymore, only metal that rolls
forwards and backwards along straight lanes. But
I think
there used to be a forest
here, grayer and more fearsome than
we prefer to recall. We might
find evidence if we search, perhaps
mushrooms feeding on decaying wood
buried in the monocultured ditch—if we
can walk this road better. We forage scraps and
rubbish in our bindles, make camp
each night under an overpass,
hike barefoot through well-mowed
grass, cutting our feet on brown bottles
and stepping around the sticky to-go cups emitting
fuzzy white molecules all around,
claiming their place for
the future to find, a signature
there in the mud. The cars don’t see
this. Inside those cabs the seats have
warmed, and there is music playing. 

Gwen Carlson is a writer based in Indiana with a background in science, currently working on a novel and poetry collection. Her previous work has appeared in Honeyguide Magazine, Consilience, Chelonian Conservation and Biology, and The New Platypus Review, and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review and Scientific American’s “Meter” poetry column.

Photo by Steve Charles