More fed than feeding,
no need to hunt, track,
seize, watch, hear,
fend off or flee,
unaware of anything,
even themselves.
Peaceable kingdom
of still or slow
moving blind grazers
on the seafloor’s bounty
of bacterial mats;
more bags of porousness
than body, billowy
neuronal fronds,
diaphanous sifters, wigglers
and saucer-shapes
softer than slime
adrift in a soupy paradise
of the un-preyed-upon,
predating all predation.
Brief proto comity
of no-call and no-response;
with nothing hard
enough to shatter,
to leave behind
more than a faint
imprint on the oldest
stone in a cave
a thousand miles
from the nearest sea,
signifying what, if not
the inverse bending
of a universe of eye
for an eye, and tooth
for tooth, through merely
eye and tooth back
to a peace that passes
understanding which
we can’t help
but hope will be, some day,
the other way
the universe is bending.
—Alan Shapiro
Alan Shapiro’s most recent book, By and By, was published in October 2023.
