Germinating & Inescapable Emptiness

Erin Robertson

Germinating

Today the sunflower seeds have split.

They sit like toques on tall green crowns,

leaves not yet spread

but muscled up from the soil

after the kiss of drenched earth

swelled them to bursting,

sent them twisting upward

toward the slow fire of sunlight.

Now their subterranean selves

are held in midair,

incontrovertible evidence that buried potential

may emerge into the light.

My son, fourteen, has sowed plenty of other seeds,

but is still stirred to see so plainly

the black-and-white striped husks

perched atop the sprung green.

Now the cells of these new sprouts 

should keep splitting until they, too, 

bear golden crowns surrounding 

the next generation of smooth striped packets of hope

ready to be pushed into the waiting earth,

ready to split and rocket into light after only 

a week’s worth of sunrises and sets.

My son sits paused at the end of boyhood

waiting for the silent prompt that sends

his own cells doubling, his blonde crown

also stretching to sun. He waits, and takes on faith

that like the simple black seeds,

his body houses the knowledge needed

to transform and grow,

to shed one phase for the next,

to thrive in the light.

Inescapable Emptiness

My son cries for another Hawaiian bird

whose common name I cannot say—

'Akikiki?

But I can say what they call

the last wild female left:

Pakele.

(You know it’s dire

when they give them a name.)

And I know what her name means:

To escape.

If she survives another year,

he wants to make a pilgrimage to her;

he wants the heartbreak of being in her presence.

All he can offer is his pain.

All he can do is witness.

We bring our young into this world of dissolution

unsure their tender selves will bear

all the causes of our undoing.

For Pakele and her kin

it’s the high-pitched whine

and indiscriminate bite

of mosquitoes unknown to these islands

until we brought them

and the avian malaria they carry.

Too small to trap out, too numerous to undo,

now our error strips Hawaiian forests 

of their songs every day.

All we can do is distract each other,

pointing to the sounds that still remain—

the trill of hermit thrush at dusk,

sunny burble of meadowlark on fencepost,

rasp of raven against white alpine sky,

rattle of crane transiting spring—

any frequency that might ease

the ache of life’s losses.

Galaxies

  lupines

  lynx

        swallowtails—

      wonders all—

and not one of them fit to fill the hole

of Pakele’s heart stilled to silence.

So he will go thank her if he can

for enduring the thankless task of being last.

He will earnestly tell this drab little honeycreeper

how honored he is to speak his love aloud to her,

a still-breathing bird,

not yet a pixelated memory.

And this whole heart-offering scene 

will be one more devastation

I cannot stop.