The Bobcat

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by Laura Parker Roerden

I awoke to a moonlit hayfield,
as if entering a dream.

A bobcat, crouched in dried grass,
was staring at me.

I watched back, his frighteningly large outline
a shadow, his two eyes

outstretched as if
handing me something.

He lifted the full moon
from the edge of the now dark hayfield,

turned it on its edge in a
confusing confluence of planes

“Be all that you are,” he whispered,
as he handed me that sliver upended,
a magician with a coin.

I looked inward and saw vast ocean,
a starry night contained;

I spacewalked underwater
and swam beside sharks,

returned flecks of seahorses
to eelgrass, where they held firm
to oncoming tide.

I drifted in currents with turtles
as if pulled by a magnet
home to make nests, where we lumbered on land

held down by memory and rock,
until eggs lay glimmering, tiny lights—
perfect pearls—destined for return.

I awoke when the bobcat
stamped once with his paw,
and lept back into brush,

leaving heaves of grass,

waves upon waves
undulating,

sheaves folding,
and then unfolding the dark.

 

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She has served on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.

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Published by Laura Parker Roerden

Laura Parker Roerden shares a love of what nature can teach us. Writer, public speaker and supportor of youth to boldly know and save the wilds. She is the founding director of Ocean Matters and a fourth generation farmer and thinks today’s young people are reason to be hopeful about the many environmental problems facing us. She lives on a family farm in Massachusetts with her husband, three boys, and an assortment of fruit trees and farm animals.

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