A Nescient Epidemic

The ant never questions
why the sun lifts its red shoulder over the hill—
it simply follows the warm geometry
of the earth’s grooves,
a pilgrim of instinct.

Beetles click like small forgotten machines,
moving as if pushed by an unseen thumb,
and the grasses lean their green spines
into the wind’s unthinking sermon.

Even the cedars, old as unkept promises,
never learn the language of fire—
they only crackle and surrender
as though survival were a rumor
whispered by other trees.

From the brushline come the foxes,
eyes bright as flint struck in darkness,
yet still bound to ancient patterns
etched before memory had a name.

Horses shiver under storm-lit skies,
feeling only the tremor of rain
and not the metaphor of it.

And nearer to us…

Elephants who mourn with moonlit gravity,
dolphins carving thought-shaped arcs through water,
both hovering just shy
of the threshold we crossed
yet seem so eager to retreat from.
Their knowing glimmers like a lantern
held one step behind ours,
steady, dignified, unwilling
to call itself superior.

And here…

Stand the architects of our nations,
polished with education, glowing with practiced certainty,
abandoning the very intelligence they claim to wield
their hunger for authority a kind of self-imposed blindness.

They sculpt illusions for the masses,
forgetting that deception, once lit,
casts a shadow long enough to outlive its maker.
And in the end, we are left with a forehead
patched by a useless bandage,
a token gesture pressed to a wound
no simple dressing can repair—
for it cannot mend the “gone fishing” hollowness
echoing inside far too many vacant skulls.