Not Us Alone

Not Us Alone

Brian Volck

If, as we now know, trees consult their neighbors
through microscopic fungi and congeries of roots,
humpback whales commune in lengthy song,
undulating utterance, and plaintive moan,
and honeybees dance to teach their sisters
the day’s new pollen path, might not the chattering birds
debate what obscure purposes prompt our own
quaint habits and ruinous compulsions?
More to the point, might not our fellow creatures praise –
each in their own idiom – all that is
for the fathomless fact of being?
Might not every living thing from ape to insect
and sequoia to slime mold harbor some fervent
devotion according to its nature,
and who but the most narrowminded
materialist, for whom consciousness itself
is nothing but the brain’s quaint parlor trick,
would deny that dogs love their humans
in an earnest, doggy way? Is it scandalous then,
to imagine when we from time to time
declare our unmistakably equivocal
affection for this world, that the world
loves us back, that our erratic ardor
for created things is more than matched,
never passes unrequited?

---

Brian Volck
Poet & Pediatrician

Brian Volck is a pediatrician, and a writer whose poetry collection Flesh Becomes Word (2013) was published by Dos Madras Press. He divides his time between Baltimore, Cincinnati, and the landscape of his heart, the American Southwest.

Photography by Naara Inub