Balance

I’m on a wonder walk at Land’s End.
Bold bones of gray-barked trees emerge ghost-like
from coastal fog as the sun rises at the edge of my city.

My own arthritic bones have creaked out of bed this morning
to be upright and alive, to trek up, down, and around a dirt path
that winds through Nature on the tip of a Peninsula above the Pacific.

How do I balance the beauty of this place, the crisp air, fresh on my face
with the world collecting like lint inside my pocket inside my iPhone—
that rabbit hole of news, views, and untruths, that dump of distraction.

I pull out my iPhone and choose to use it as camera, to focus it
on backlit ferns that suddenly border my path like a Rousseau jungle
of flames—chartreuse shapes that light my way forward.

I look up. A coal-black raven high above me demands my respect,
his talons on Cypress, a branch refusing to break despite decades of storms
here on the edge of the hardly-Pacific Ocean.

How do I balance this beauty on the 22nd day of February 2025
—a Saturday in the middle of a coup in my own country for God’s sake—
where even the bald eagles are beginning to fall from a deadly flu?

How do I balance the beauty of this windswept spit of land cordoned off
for recreation as a kind of museum-like experience of Nature, like a Madonna
somewhere in Italy, surviving to channel life’s miracle through Raphael?

How do I balance the beauty of this still-vibrant place where manifest destiny
meets Land’s End, where Paradise is all but lost on asphalted Earth, our plastic-
infested, war-bloodied home of the homeless, our speck of dust still spinning in the dark?

How do I balance the beauty of this morning, the glory hallelujah of my own body
breathing, seeing, being wonderstruck in Nature… with the horror of my own family
of overpopulated humans— wounded, wounding—so bent, we are, on self-destruction.

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