Awe

ISSUE: Fall 2021

Yesterday a milk snake. The day before, a baby skunk. Today a sapsucker.

—Chip Blake

What damage do I do?
The night avoids my eyes, so does the road.
I am never wholly myself, unto myself.

I need to know the life span
of the June bug who, like a small bison,
headbutts my summer screen door,

why the luna moth has no mouth,
or if it was a sapsucker not a downy woodpecker
at the feeder a few days ago.

A friend of mine stops to bury
any roadkill he comes across,
each journey he takes is like the end

of a war, the dead lining a road
that was supposed to lead to somewhere
greater. I saw the first firefly

of the season not out in the field
hovering like a star above the unwieldy
night grass, but on the window near the light

on my desk, his own light dark.
I have held the dead
in my hands like my friend.

And like him, I want to leave
nothing to strangers. I want to bury
all that I find with its hunger and awe.

Didi Jackson

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen, 2020). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New England Review, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals and magazines. She has had poems in Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, and most recently Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University.