I’m not sure when I wrote this, after 2006 but before 2011 not sure. It was published in a collected book of poems, since removed from Amazon: Absent Ginsberg The chap who collated the collection said it was a marvelous piece, me, being me, find it a little naive.
Though the kingfishers looked
So beautiful; specks of shocking blue
Against the dead green and dark water.
They chased each other like in love —
And you said, “they are us.”
But what I saw was food
Clenched in a beak and
The chase was not love
But hunger
Their blue so fleeting,
ordinary but bright
perhaps just birds hungry
finding food and surviving.
love not here but within us
mistaken for passion
and base
instinct.
What they left in me was experience.
never forgotten
unlike the awkward moment of disclosure
when we saw different things
and perhaps it was not food
but material to build on love
the falsehood of feeling to
perpetuate the breed
for without the passion there
would be nothing.