This hunger, this need, this growing seed:
this is life.
It claws, it bites, it fights,
and it will not be denied.
Call it fertility,
whether the urge drives grain or kine or man;
Call it creativity:
reap the harvest of song and dance and verse.
Call it what it is:
all things stretch out fingers, tendrils, root
toward that which is at once
source and goal.
Branches reach out and up toward the sun,
wooden talons piercing the sky.
Fox and vixen couple and spawn a clutch of kits,
pups that will grow, chase their prey, feed,
and go on to take mates of their own.
There is no life without growth, without change;
take those away, and though one might still breathe,
still feed, still sleep, still – even – dance,
what remains is nothing but death.
In that growth, that change, the energy that we are
becomes more;
passive potential becomes primal power,
the source and the shape becoming the sum
of all that we are, and what we might,
like the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis,
turn into, once all our struggles and strivings
change impossibility into infinity.
All Their Voices 