Cheryl Caesar
Thanks
Let us be thankful for pumpkins.
Not for the grainy and soapy-taste pies,
nor for the hideous lattes.
But, perhaps, for the seeds, when they’re salted and roasted.
Each crunch an explosion of nutrients, recalling
that we are all concentrates of energy.
Thank them for their carved faces, which so quickly
wither, like victims of bad plastic surgeons.
The eyes and mouths expanding, until
they touch, and all caves inward. Fading
before us, time-lapse flowers in reverse.
Dorian’s portrait out on our front porches.
Thanks to the pets, the cats and the dogs,
whose lives are measured in decades, making
them markers of family eras. “Back when
we had Rocky,” we say. So simply, they give us
the whole of their earth span. Bracketing us
on the other side, tortoises live to a hundred
and fifty, but moving slow, and carrying
their dwellings. Or you could surrender
motility altogether, and be a redwood, learning
to speak with your roots, underground. If you
are willing to give up your spine, you can be an immortal
jellyfish and never die, they say. When bad times come,
you revert to a polyp, and start again. They call it
“transdifferentiation,” but if you wish, it can be
transmigration of souls—that is, if you agree
to grant the jellyfish a soul. If not
I leave it to you to decide: When all
the cells are replaced, is it still the same
creature? I doubt if the jellyfish cares.
—Submitted on 11/24/2020
Cheryl Caesar is the author of Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era (Thurston Howl Publications, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Prachya Review, Panoply, Light, Origami Poems Project, Ponder Savant, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka. Caesar holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She teaches writing at Michigan State University.
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