Don Schaeffer Poet Free verse

The Great Not Me

They go to the beach 
beyond the big trees. 
 A salt march where the sound 
 tumbles around them.
 They walk through 
 their unfamiliarity and differences, 
 taking a hundred photographs. 
 Strange to walk 
 through sand in the cold, 
 passing remnants of broken brick walls, 
 shrines made of plastic, steel rods and flags. 
 The sea birds wired together swirl overhead 
 and damp down like 
 a foamy cotton bedspread on the shallow water.
 They look for deer but don't find any.


So much history here 
but the story isn't pieced together 
 and narrated for them. 
 They can just see the outer edge fragments 
 that penetrate into their own time. 
 The animals go about their business, 
 surviving the winter as the companions 
 walk through the sand with their imperfect shoes. 
 What the animals do is not their business. 
 Spying on the animals is meaningless.

 Their origins are not known to them. 
 They don't own their own histories, 
 have no claim to them. It is owned by people 
 who no longer share their knowlege bubbles.

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