Psychologists call it the White Bear
Syndrome, when your brain can’t stop
Thinking
I call it the squirrels how those tyrants
Of the birdfeeder never rest until they
Find a way in or out
Whose teeth never stop growing
They gnaw to survive
Their name means shadow how they hide
In the shade of their own tail
outsmart outwit outlast
Their memory, the dozens hundreds of
Caches they don’t forget are concealed
Or if they do, how the acorn grows
Another generation’s crop of sustenance
I was thinking of the special counsel
If his brain is ever free of inquiry
How each discovery burrows deep raises
More questions as if we are at the heart
Of something deeper more contagious
Than our own exhausted vulnerability
How at the heart of survival we are tested
How if squirrels can take down the power grid
More times than the zero times the hackers have
If our heads are spinning from the acrobatic
Leaps it requires to get to the bottom
As if there is a bottom
How our special counsel learned to sleep
In jungle warfare steeled his courage
Through another national nightmare
We read the story how he led a fire team
Into enemy territory would not leave a wounded
Comrade behind survived his own wounding
He has called it ground truth
What he is gnawing at the kernel the seed
Of what keeps us awake at night
How he learned to sleep in Vietnam
When nothing made sense except the duty
To stay sharp to get us out alive
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Mueller is reportedly wrapping up his obstruction of justice case on Trump – but might wait to file charges [Business Insider]
Here’s what happens if ‘magnificent bastard’ Mueller gets fired [WIRED]
Yvonne Daley is a career journalist who returned to poetry for sanity in these difficult times. She lives in Vermont, still a sane place.
Image by Elle Aviv Newton.
