TWO WAYS OF LOOKING AT DISASTER

It’s a recipe they’ve been cooking up for ever so long. Leaf through a shiny magazine, pore over today’s headlines and tell me I’m wrong.

They whipped up like a glop of imitation cream the illusion that rich means good, then spoonfeed up the iffy dream that anyone can have it all.

Lesser creatures never matter birds and forests, air and water. They keep stirring fast and faster— cooking up yet more disaster.

Caterpillars ate every leaf on every oak and moved on to the popples and pines. They poured over one another, creatures of bristle and hunger, objects of an inner recipe that transforms leaves into frass and shed skins and cocoons of iffy goo and moths and more caterpillars. Today the oaks are showing what can be done. Every twig, sports a tiny leaf or bud. Every twig. Every single one.