Habitat Destruction

The classroom blinds are shut to keep out the morning
sun angling through the thin slats. Bands of daylight falling
in too-sharp contrast to the room, blurring the images on the board.
Today, the bog turtle has been picked to watch. A thick-shelled mute specimen
representing an entire endangered species. I walk in and out of the seated rows
asking students to stop talking, joking, phones not-so hidden in their laps,

“What’s the problem facing this species?” I ask, waiting,
in spite of the sea of disinterested faces, still waiting for words.
Habitat destruction, is the answer we are waiting for, I’ve been told.
Instead, another question, called out too loudly by the boy in the back
with dark eyes, the boy who talks too much, “Why should I care?”
he asks, angrily, “What did that dumb turtle ever do for me?”
everyone else looks, waits for my answer.
His words, meant to challenge me, are also sincere.

And, what would you say?

If you were me?

To this child who spends his days in front of screens
and plastic packages of food, filled but not nourished,
what do you care if his parents work one job after the next,
barely surfacing between, what do you care,
if a boy only knows the earth stuck to his shoes?

And what would you say to the puzzled boy last week
who asked me what a heron was,
another one who only knows a world that blares
and tames.

“What’s a heron?” I asked back, stalling, struggling,
groping to find a comparison to something else he would know.

Yes, I could describe the bird, what it eats, its body, its shape
long legs, large frame, neck that swoops down like a U,

but what about all the rest?

What about the shimmering water
at the edge of the wood,
the blue-gray creature tiptoeing
his knobby legs across the surface,
the rushing current bubbling white
against the old-man backs of rocks,
the morning mist-breath of the creek
lingering below a canopy of trees,
old bird knees hinging backwards
hoisting his body, the powerful wing-strokes
as he makes his way back home,
great long legs stretched out behind him,
leather ballerina toes pointed
as he disappears

“Just put ’em in a zoo”, another student says of the turtle,

smacking her gum, “then they’ll be safe.”

The girl who had to quit her favorite sport last week,
so that she could hurry to leave one set of concrete walls for another,
so she could hurry from this numbered set of classrooms, to board buses,
and check-in to the shelter that she and her mom had to go back to again.

And what next? Maybe tomorrow I will put down these textbooks and go off

to teach a class of pandas, raised in captivity, about just what they should love
in the cool bamboo of mountains they’ve never seen, and how the light shines
between the long green stalks of the morning, how it casts slender reflections
that fall to earth at your feet, like soft bars you can walk right through.
“What did it ever do for me?” they might ask, with stained furry faces, and
black circles around their eyes, meant for somewhere else,

“Why should I care?”

And what if one day we’ve asked every plant and animal we can get
our hands on, every unfurling may apple, tree-snag, darter fish, wren,
what each of them ever did for us, until we are left with nothing
but the answer.

In the wood of absence,
maybe we will finally begin
agreeing about what they gave us, and what should have changed,
while were busy learning
how to lose our way.