If we forget

14

If the environmentalist forgets
that his house is made of wood,
if the logger forgets
that the forest is full of beauty,

if the vegetarian forgets
how life teems with death,
if the hunter forgets
how the doe nuzzles her fawn,

then each is lost:
to one another,
to the world that is,
to the world that could be.

Our task is to remember.

© 2015 Tovar Cerulli

14 comments

  3. Steve Arnst says:

    In this world of high speed internet and instant gratification we need to slow down and reconnect to nature, each other and ourselves. To see and appreciate how everything is connected; everything is related. What a world that would be.

  5. Tes Jolly says:

    Amen! Beautiful, precise and absolutely true. Thank you for sharing this reminder. I enjoy your writing. As a hunter and one of Native American descent, your poem reminds me of one of my most cherished quotes. It appears, without credit, on a decades old print of a Native American brave in a mountainous backdrop, that reads, “A frequent drink of the beauty about us is good medicine for the soul.”

  7. andrea says:

    i like this (:

    i wish there was another term for what i actually am. i tell people i am a vegetarian because i don’t eat meat. when people find out, their first response is usually either something defensive about why we should eat meat (in which i usually agree) or they ask me why. or it’s a vegetarian who goes on a rant on why you wouldn’t eat your dog. i’m not a vegetarian because we shouldn’t eat meat. i am a vegetarian because we shouldn’t abuse animals. i don’t eat inhumanly raised and unethically killed animals. we are supposed to be omnivores. we are meant to hunt and eat like any other omnivore/carnivore. but we don’t. lions don’t box up antelope for their whole lives in tiny, torturous cages and conditions, fattening them up and messing with their genes only to kill them slowly and painfully, and then kill the rest of the herd just because he can and wants more and more and more food. if we saw that behavior in any animal we would think it to be sadistic and disturbed. when we learn to live, hunt and eat like the lion, then we will have our earned our right to consider ourselves carnivores again.

    • Tovar says:

      Thanks, Andrea.

      “I am a vegetarian because we shouldn’t abuse animals.” Well put.

      Members of many traditional hunting cultures are similarly disturbed by confinement and abuse of animals. They hunt certain animal-persons, yet also have great respect for those same beings.

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