Multitude

In January, geese fly overhead
Arrowing their way to the lake beyond the wood.
They pass over
And pass over
And again, they pass over
In their ones, their tens, their hundreds,
Until breathless, you realize, their thousands have come and gone.
They appear before dusk, when the clouds are soft and small, the sky pink like spun sugar,
And they sing as they go, that wild, ululating cry.

They know nothing of plagues, or how the world has ground to an unstable halt;
How in that grinding the Earth seems fit to tear itself apart.
They know only that it is warm in January–warm enough to feign a spring,
And perhaps they’re right.
Perhaps it is spring, and we have shifted the seasons as we grind down the Earth.
“Look,” you tell the small souls in your charge. “Look up from your books
And see what they are teaching you.
There is one,
There is ten,
There is a hundred,
And a thousand.”

They look up with wonder in their eyes, and no book could teach this–
How the finite can seem to last forever.