A Minor Thump
Jan 9 2025
The dead porcupine
by the side of the road
had left a trail of blood
across the salt-stained pavement.
The frozen body
lying huddled in the ditch
still bristled with quills;
no defence against the car
that turned it to roadkill
on the dark winter night
it stood its ground.
The frozen body
will soon be gone
despite the cold,
consumed
by scavengers and squabbling birds
and roving opportunists.
While the next big snow
will erase the bloody trail.
The driver
will never notice the stain
near the right front wheel,
didn’t register
the minor thump
on the the long drive home.
As if nothing had happened.
As if the porcupine
had never existed,
and the desperate struggle to live
had been merely hypothetical.
An inconsequential life
and unacknowledged death.
If the universe began with the big bang
how should I make sense
of something out of nothing,
a cosmic spasm
that created space itself?
But what disturbs me more
is the more down to earth
something to nothing
that comes at the end.
A life, extinguished in a flash,
taking with it
all that came before.
And all the suffering
a quantum particle
that at the very same time
both is and is not.
Because how does one quantify pain?
And if something can’t be measured
does it even exist?
Two bright eyes
caught in the headlights
no one saw;
no bloody trail,
no struggle to live,
no dead body
left to rot.
Except for the brief glimpse I caught, driving past
when I braked for the deer
who out of nowhere
darted across.
And which I would have soon forgotten
if that quick glance
hadn’t given me this poem.
An epitaph
to a dead animal
by the side of the road.
As usual, in the mood to write but nothing to write about.
So when this image of roadkill appeared, I figured as good as anything and might as well riff. This is where it took me.\
I think it agonizes more over the futility of life than the extinguishment of death. Which, I know, is terribly nihilistic: that with no ultimate meaning and no memory, it’s as if we never existed. In plain declarative prose, this sounds very black. At least poetry softens it a bit!
Or maybe softens it so much that the reader gets a very different message from this poem. Who knows. Once you let a poem out into the world, it’s no longer yours.
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