The Bandits are Coming

A Poem by Mark Strohschein

after Daniel Edward Moore & Mark Simpson

The animals sense it
more than we do.
They have adapted &
continue to adapt
because of us &
our hell-bent drive
to bury the earth.

Geese honk through
thick-particulate air.
Deer are driven away
from burnt grass.
Fish rise dead from
now trickling rivers
or over-heated ponds.

The irony is those who
can envision apocalypse
are those least likely
to stop its thundering herd
of death bandits from rolling
rolling in from that deep forest
of past regrets, recklessness, inaction.

You can scarcely make out
those vibrational tremors
the ones that may not register
the ones the other animals in
the forest feel shooting up their
hooves, limbs & into their stiff
shocked souls.

Those are for real.

                 The bandits are coming.

---

Mark Strohschein (he/him) is a Washington state poet who lives on Whidbey Island. His work is forthcoming in The Aerial Perspective. His poems have appeared in Flint Hills Review, Bryant Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Barren Magazine, Lips Poetry Magazine, The Milk House, The Big Windows Review, in anthologies, and elsewhere.

Photo by Annie Spratt