Poem: Battle over the Meadow

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Battle over the Meadow

You wouldn’t know it
but there is a battle
over the meadow

and if you have
emperor eyes
from thirty feet

you can see a spark
of red iridescently, and green
the color of a mallard’s

cravat, flashing
like tiny, distant epaulettes
of a Russian

officer under the almost
melancholy gaze
of Napoleon

across a field
assessing numbers, the
morning, the sun’s saber,

the black locust tree’s strategic
conversation with
robin about the worm,

the bottle-green line
of spider silk
crossed and recrossed

in the attack of the dragonflies
whose wings pulse and quiver
in the sun, shuttling

and defending their snatch
of gnats
and mosquitoes

whose air belongs to them
fleetingly
but deliciously, the morning

being so frangible
with almost
immortality

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