My Friend Who Cared

My Friend Who Cared

After finishing the news articles
about how President Bush made
a fool of himself by pretending
to not understand a bad joke,
and after catching up on the
deaths in Iraq, its growing chaos,
the latest midterm election polls,
and who would be on Leno tonight,

my friend found an article on
the bottom corner of his paper,
actually a bit of the corner was torn
and a smudge of Garfield from the
comics page was staining the words—
but he could make out its data
without all the words intact.

He read the polar ice caps are melting,
ever so much faster than before,
and now it’s been discovered that
all the fish in the ocean are dying,
ever so much faster than before,
and he quickly wondered why
his neighbors weren’t sitting at their tables,
like him, wondering how to stop it—
he panicked until he found the key phrase:
there is still time to correct these problems.

Feeling alone, powerless, and having
already been drained from work and school,
my friend did what he felt he only could;
he tied his shoes, threw on his coat,
walked behind his house and faced
the small forest that was still green,
the birds that were still chirping so loud,
and the sky that was still glowing blue,

and he told himself to relax, breath, that
there is still time to correct our problems—
as this thought calmed him he crumbled
belly first onto the long wet grass
and gently clenched it into his hands
as he breathed in that smell of cold soil;
he felt his heart beat alongside hers.

My friend stayed there for minutes,
getting reacquainted with his old friend.
He forgot about the nukes in North Korea,
the terror in Afghanistan, its growing chaos,
and the failures of the worst president
in all of the United States’ history—
he forgot all of this and whispered to the grass:

“I care.”