Everyday Traffic- A Poem

A coyote crosses the road

Five lanes wide and running

A vast expanse of greenery beckons

Tall grasses, a pond just out of sight

An entire world

Its entire world

What used to be the openness of belonging

A small god in a different time

And it sprints

Exhaustion in its limbs, the creak of tired bone

A disorganized army of sedans bearing down

Stalks of native grass wave in greeting

Prairie flowers bloom purple and

Goldfinch yellow

Welcoming home a resident treated as a pestilence

Even though it has only ever lived

Here

A wanderer in its own land

A traveler who never left

Soil greets its feet, a welcome reprieve

The horde a distant memory in its wake

It doesn’t know it has only the next ten steps

That a chain link fence rises as if to say

This isn’t yours, not anymore

You can run

Run as far as you like

There are gutters and roads to be chased from

But these fields, its beauty,

The vast openness

The roads are short and

They are no longer yours.

Still, you can linger, linger as they all do

Watch the grass yellow with the daylight

Watch every petal fall for the sake of a uniform green

Run along, now

Run along

Trace the outskirts

Dig into the concrete so you might finally sleep.