A Crow Rips Apart a Wounded Sandpiper

Mangled kelp at the wrack line.

Seal rots in the dunes.

Crow rips apart a wounded sandpiper.

Headless gull torqued in the sand.

Another gull pecks a writhing crab.

I’ve never seen a crow kill another bird.

Perhaps it portends a new era.

Robinson Jeffers wrote poems for a dying humanity

from witnessing similar scenes in nature.

I reject his metaphors.

There is too much life in death here at the ocean’s edge.

The husky and I run wild in the foamy tide.

We roughhouse in the wind and rain.

I’m cheering for us!

One day we’ll walk into the ocean together

and return as rain.

My greatest aspiration.

Pity the people

encased in caskets,

entombed in mausoleums,

waiting forever for mudslides

to wash away graveyards

and release them to water.

(This does happen to some Pioneer cemeteries on the Oregon Coast. I’ve seen one in Newport.

What a terrible way to live on, trapped on land,

serenaded for eternity by lawnmowers and leaf blowers

in a failed nation state.