There are geese in the road
a monogamous pair protecting

five goslings from the onslaught
of morning traffic
like many families
they knit together in times of change
times of great movement
unbearable crisis

here they cross
Silicon Beach tenderly
bookending their nestlings
from the Metro we
know human urgency waits
for no one
least of all these.

Like Artemis and Apollo
two people exit their cars to help
diverting traffic
with grand river reversals.

I too have been these birds
up from the fen
a resurrected masthead
battening down feathery hatches
with a limp bolt crushed
cradled and flimsy –

I am the webbed feet I saw
blindly crossing roads beak-first
though I go toward loneliness not
living my cruel balcony view stretches

to a corner where he is
sometime-now-no-more husband
the other grown goose.

We are not mythical archers.
We cannot protect
our young caught each day
at brutal intersections
of what was and what now is not.

– Candice Kelsey

Author’s Note: This particular poem was inspired by an actual situation of geese trying to cross one of the busiest roads in West LA. At the time, my husband and I were separated and I couldn’t help but see our family in those geese.