Memucan Pays His Debt

You were too, too harsh.
Atoms failed and flew apart,
imperfectly reassembled,
they stumble through space,
molecules struggle to form,
and there is life somehow.

These children you see
are not their father's,
not their mother's children.
They leech to the leviathan
like citizens of Rome

while we chase after ourselves,
after the all and nothing "I"
as if our roots did not exist
and our seeds were not falling
toward the future.



(Permafrost, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Fall 1985)