possibility buzzes in each shadow
as if trees are swapping molecules with the street
in the moment between a summer day and a rain storm
when the wind feels like thunder.
I am riding my bike down the back streets toward home
after a presentation about butterflies at the library.
About how humans, in all their folly, can restore things.
About inmates tending to rare flower plantings or caterpillars —
how they cherish it.
Imprisonment is its own tragedy,
each heart in its trajectory—trying to live,
to right poverty or subjugation—
can loose its place of rest
like the dwindling monarchs.
But to learn how the human heart longs
so much
to tend to something precious,
to be tender in the harshest circumstance —
this is everything.
On my bike in the shifty dusk
all my plans are gone,
none so precious as this choice
to tend to the quiet in the wind,
my feet pedaling, the gray street.
Butterfly lecture by the Institutefor Applied Ecology which is involved with many ecological restoration projects involving men and women inmates.
Did
you know that 1 in 100 Americans are incarcerated and only about half
of the people in prisons committed violent crimes?
Bill Moyers has some excellent articles about this
problem.
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