Fish Ladder

These determined salmon
Traveling hundreds of miles
Driven by some intractable force
Returning home against all odds
To beget a new generation
And then to die on the bank

They know something I don't:
That they will never get to see
Or have to endure the adolescence
Of their spawn, to watch them
Face their own struggles upstream,
While swimming in the shallows
Wringing their fins unable to say
A word.

Andrine de la Rocha

posted 9/15/2010