Today's poem is by K. A. Hays

From my pocket on a hike, a tone warns me
       

The end of the Paris Climate Agreement,
says my iPhone, stacking up notifications,
& meanwhile moss
mounds gentle on a boulder, moss,
green as green as greening—
a vertical happiness of spore and spread,
soft loops one to another, this
for five hundred million years,

slow to some—
time for the perceiver
isn't time for the perceived—

but neither fast nor slow to the rocks beneath me
holding their past liquid selves that swiveled
& turned, accepting,
while far off but parallel to me, a goose loiters
in an insecticide field, intoning a warning (or something else)—
which I project onto the goose to mean
I'm lost, I'm lost.
I've lost my way.

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Copyright © 2023 K. A. Hays All rights reserved
from Anthropocene Lullaby
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission