Roadkill
Shame rises like a fetid odour
around certain kinds of death,
The type that exposes
the innate nakedness
of a beating mammalian heart.
Would it matter less if it were amphibian
or a cold blooded other?
Plainly rhetorical musing …
I drive past mountains …
a casually heaped
blanket of green,
backdrop to concrete vistas
of human industry.
An anomaly…
yet, perfectly sheltering
such mortals habituated
to viridescent places, sparkling brooks
tannic creeks and dim undergrowth,
lofty disheveled trees …
And is it an idle curiosity
that makes them leave these nurturing spaces?
limiting spaces … limited spaces …
I wouldn’t know
Or would it matter to know?
For it lies there ,
that once robust heart
painted in unflattering hues
on sweltering tarmac …
Lost to the camouflage
of once salubrious woods
vainly appealing
to the insouciant gaze
of fleeting headlights.
Death and Goodyear
conspired to plot
across bitumen and asphalt
the two dimensional …
How does one graph consciousness?
I ask no one in particular …
it’s plainly rhetorical …
Like death
By Davina E. Solomon
Biography:
Davina E. Solomon is a Botanist, Educator and Poet. Having spent many years on the Arabian and then the Swahili Coast, she now thrives in a riparian habitat.
Pingback: Roadkill – The Erudite Boeotian
I think you are on to something here Davina – there is deep shame where death comes not from nature but from not-nature, your striking phrase ‘Death and Goodyear’. I am hot sure how to put this, but this unbidden emotion, shame, in this post-industrial landscape you describe here, perhaps stems not from the understandable and therefore amoral, sympathetic understandable death by human or even animal, as in hunter/prey, need, but its opposite – by careless, cold, indifferent, wasteful, callous, thoughtless, purposeless death? Mammals are killed every year by the millions, deliberately and with purpose, in our slaughterhouse, but there is a residual meaning here, that these deaths are not shameful, though they are not noble.. But roadkill is a little like death by stark and rampant indifference, as by indifference and callousness, as by process rather than by determinant action: shame and honour, meaninglessness and purpose. I think today with shame of the meaninglessness of certain kinds of deaths of human mammals, of deaths in magnitudes and also I suppose individual, where guilt and innocence plays no part, but rather indifference, callousness, carelessness, waste… thanks for sharing this