ELECTION — a poem by Alfred K. LaMotte:

 

I voted.

 

I voted for the rainbow.

 

I voted for the cry of a loon.

 

I voted for my grandfather’s bones

that feed beetles now.

 

I voted for a singing brook that sparkles

under a North Dakota bean field.

 

I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies

South along the shores of two continents.

 

I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring

of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth.

 

I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam,

and the old democracy of worms.

 

I voted for the wordless treaty that cannot be broken

by white men or brown, because it is made of star semen,

thistle sap, hieroglyphs of the weevil in prairie oak.

 

I voted for the local, the small, the brim

that does not spill over, the abolition of waste,

the luxury of enough.

 

I voted for the commonwealth of the ancient forest,

a larva for every beak, a wing-tinted flower

for every moth’s disguise, a well-fed mammal’s corpse

for every colony of maggots.

 

I voted for open borders between death and birth.

 

I voted on the ballot of a fallen leaf of sycamore

that cannot be erased, for it becomes the dust and rain,

and then a tree again.

 

I voted for more fallow time to cultivate wild flowers,

more recess in schools to cultivate play,

more leisure, tax free, more space between days.

 

I voted to increase the profit of evening silence

and the price of a thrush song.

I voted for ten million stars in your next inhalation.