10 Things I like about Cleveland: Part I

I like the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge--the Guardians, the view, the river below

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A poem to celebrate the chill

It's winter on Turtle Island.

Landscape with Mud Turtle

I'd have thought my life at halfway would look

half-grown, half-gone, or half-born,

But try as I might I can't get far enough off to see it.

Among the reeds, the rocking cattails,

the hollow seed pods of last summer's lilies,

I can't for the life of me get a long view. And why should I?

A doe drifts along the rise, fur fading with the season,

stiff and lithe by turns—the same one,

I know her by the scar, I see often browsing at the edge

where woods and marsh and graveyard lands converge.

What, I wonder, does she see? By what mark

would she know me from others of my species?

When I was a girl I used to lie down

in the pressed-grass hollows where the deer had slept.

I tried to dream myself a deer,

that wordless, that meant-to-be-there.

I pressed the rough, live ends of their antlers

against my forehead and wished.

Under the pond mud, half-frozen, dormant among

the dormant,

turtles breathe through their skins,

barely, not quite dead in their shells. Geodes.

Come spring, come stronger light, they thaw,

gasping at ice cracks, clawing at the slush and scum,

self-resurrected. It happens every year. Until it doesn't.

A pond turns marsh, turns meadow in no time flat:

silting in, not drowning all the windblown seed that falls,

letting the alder and pussy willow take root,

parching the pondweeds, deporting the turtles,

the snails that cling to the lily pads' undersides,

and the waterbirds that ate them.

A transformation before your eyes.

Where I skated in spirals one winter, beech trees grow:

Silver for silver, not everything lost.

Where red-winged blackbirds flew up singing

victorie, victorie, cardinals search the brambles for berries

and dogs off their leashes snuffle up rabbits.

After an ice storm, I found a wren stiff in the cold,

its russet specks and stripes magnified,

its eyes shut, its beak like something carved

and drawn on. I closed it in my hands

and, fool that I still am, blew through the gaps

between my thumbs.

JENNIFER ATKINSON

Witness

Volume XXII / 2009

Looting or Scavenging for Survival?

I am bothered by recent news coverage of the Earthquake aftermath in Haiti. A headline reads Looting Flares when Authority Breaks Down. If you go to the article, you can see people unearthing food from the rubble of a once-supermarket.

If I were a hungry, thirsty, homeless and desperate earthquake survivor, I'd dig in the rubble of a supermarket and try to find some food for myself and my loved ones. Is this really looting or is this smart scavenging for survival? Why is the media making victims into villains?

Now, this might qualify as looting. I'd appreciate more distinction, subtlety and understanding in the news coverage of how Haitians are attempting to feed themselves while they wait for comprehensive disaster relief.