Among the Questions Before Us

Who will we ask 
when the dark-eyed junco is gone?
When the last immeasurable glacier has vaporized? 
When Earth in its dry orbit finds nowhere to go?
 
What memory of sun and lake might move us?
What childhood vision from a time before,
in dreams will return
to remind us who we are?
 
What future beautiful and deserved
seen clearly 
from which indelible past
could urge our hands to action?
 
What love for something we didn’t need to lose,
something whispered from mother to infant inside us,
will glisten like a singular fruit on a branch so high
we will have no choice but to build a ladder together.

 
 Alfred Fournier

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