Into growing middens,
the red squirrel piles
spruce cones
and dries mushrooms 
to store.
The chickadee
scatter-caches seeds
in dozens of places.
The mole rounds up
earth worms
to corral in his larder,
and the beaver
stashes beneath water
branches of willow
and poplar to eat once 
the pond freezes over.

And I, while the sunlight
flickers 
leaf-shadowed mornings,
while gardenias perfume
the air at dusk,
while berries fatten, figs swell,  
and all is greening
and growing
in abundance oblivious
to human despair,

I’ll take these
rich hours,
plump moments,
delicious days
of warm
Gaia goodness,
gather them now
as best I can
and hold them,
[mind’s pantry,
heart’s keep]
for the Covid winter
to come.
                        

We’ll say it wasn’t so bad, the Great Pandemic,
that the skies had never been bluer,
that spring danced in all buds and green glory
unparalleled in memory,
that we grew vegetables in pots.

We’ll tell how we drank summer wine 
late into the night with no worry of alarms 
at dawn, beheld our pets and each other
as though we were newly acquainted, 
freshly arrived from the scurrying 
world made of madness. 

We’ll say that we turned off the news
to hear new warblers in the morning,
to watch for fireflies at nightfall, 
to notice the coloring of leaves as
fall’s glow was declared the brightest ever.

Books, card games, jig-saw puzzles, 
new adventures in baking bread and
homemade pasta—these we’ll list 
as resurrected pleasures.
And friends perched ten feet away
on our porch laughed even merrier,
consolation for the lack of hugs. 

We may want to stop there, seeing
the sweetness of their imaginings,
the soft stare into another time.
We may reason they’ll find out later
as we did about our fathers’ wars— 
the casualties, the grief, the mortal struggle, 
the cold stone in the belly at dawn.