lifeblood

I am reading Ed Yong's An Immense World, a book about how other animals sense and experience the world, to better hear the voices of the natural world and translate them.

Every species lives inside its own world of perception, even its own speed of time. A shrew's heart beats fifteen hundred times a minute. A blue whale's can slow to two.

This poem came from listening. It is spoken by the heart.

Alongside it is lifeblood, a bronze direct cast of a root. The root burned away in the casting, and only its shape remained.

“I share these so others can fall in love with the living world. We cannot protect what we don't love, cannot love what we don't know, and cannot know what we don't see.“

- Richard Louv