Rebecca Weil:

Animals come and go next to the marshes, forests and farmland where I write — porcupines, bear, coyotes — all the while they leave stories of where they have been and clues to what they might be doing. Trying to read their sign makes me wonder about senses and perspectives, and how we interpret the life around us.

Humans and nonhumans have such a wide range of sensory experiences, as authors, like Ed Yong in his book The Immense World, have shared. When I wrote this poem, “Not a Blessing,” I wanted to honor nonhuman beings as themselves, complete.

In responding to the beauty of Galway Kinnell’s poem “St Francis and the Sow,” I carried forward two of Kinnell’s words, “thick length,” and turned the poem a different direction, to become a question of how we might view the life around us differently — particularly about human-centric perspectives — and to ask what can happen if we remember that we, too, are animals.