Today's poem is by Cheryl Moskowitz

What is it Like to be a Bat?
       

Seeing is not imaging
or imagining
and it simply is not true
that bats have no vision
though looking is not
how they know things —
where to find the lushest mayfly.
We can only know
by being one
'what it is to be human'
and yet still
when we think ocean
it is only the qualia of blue
never the actuality of the boat
or the hundreds squeezed inside
Whole colonies
huddled like pipistrelles
in their winter roost.
Night after night
they go unnoticed.
What is it Like to be a Bat?
asks Nagel, posing the ineffable
question and knowing
that even at its highest frequency
echolocation is only a way
of hearing the self
and that consciousness
that blessed thing
is what makes real seeing
impossible
to imagine.

Copyright © 2025 Cheryl Moskowitz All rights reserved
from The Manhattan Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission