Carabid

Carabid
Kim Goldberg

A large ground beetle lumbers across pavement
his earthworm parcel twitching and flailing
like a flag in a hailstorm. The beetle wobbles
from the jerky weight of suppressed
freedom until the pair, locked as they are in each other’s
timelines by chitinous jaws, arrives at the threshold
cleaving two worlds—one mindless and gray
one a wild tangle of imagination.

And we think we know the outcome
of this narrative: a win, a loss, a sacrifice
a continuance. Victory
is in the eye, says quantum physics.
We convene panels and symposia to analyze
the intersectional oppressions of colonial
re-enactments played out in our tattered streets
and weedy byways. We birth
new twitter hashtags to announce the arrival
of our insight. We learn the meaning of
syncretism and why this isn’t

that. We push our trembling minds
into every pedagogical slit and smokestack
but we forget to let our palms and knees simply
drop to the earth. For anything can occur
when the back end of a beetle burdened with a twisting
sack of rebellion vanishes into a shield of heartbeats
feral and green.

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