April 11 Poetry: Echolocation and trip to th Zoo!

This poem, by Deborah A Miranda, caught my eye because we were at the Zoo today! Zoo's are ambivalent for me. Being up close and personal to so many animals is awesome but many of them, especially the large mammals, I end up feeling kind of sorry for.

I guess all in all this poem is about being trapped, wanting to go free- or not?
I hear it...I hear the questions resonate in my own life right now.




Echolocation

For the bats at the Point Defiance Zoo

All day long you flutter through artificial night;
hover, sway, wrap furred bodies in leathery shawls
after aborted flight, cling to false stalactites.
Do you know when the moon outside is full,
do you miss the veering, out-all beats
of easy strength across the lunar face,
every stroke of wingspan a simple masterpiece?
Do you remember the soaring, twirling, swooping pace,
the snap of insects' hard chitinous shells,
soft velvet of a moth's frantic wings?
You eat, excrete, mate, bear young in your tiny cell
but does a warm summer night's calling
echo like a long jagged cave twisting deep into stone,
reverberate against your blood and bone?

Daniel, John Ed. Wild Song: Poems from the Natural World, (University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA., 1998)