“CA Hwy 1” by Allen Forrest, oil on canvas

Unhatched Caddis

struggling in the raft bag
in the back of my car
required an 8 hour drive
back to her native river.

I was accused of doing it
on purpose
so I could go fishing
but it was because

I too had been taken
from my home
of ancient evergreens
and swift pure waters.

For years I have watched them
hatch and rise
like tiny wish-granting fairies
landing on my arm.

On our long drive
she sat by me in a blueberry
Nancy’s yogurt cup
and I kept the music low

so as not to hurt
her caddis ears
which were likely
injured

when my landlord said,
“Does Scott know
the carbon footprint
to save that bug?”

At the river
caddis crawled away
in her stone tower
and lived happily ever after,

maybe the only one
of her kind
in 10,000 years
to be that crazy-lucky.

Scott T. Starbuck was a 2013 Artsmith Fellow on Orcas Island, a 2014 Friends of William Stafford Scholar at the “Speak Truth to Power” FOR Seabeck Conference, and writer-in-residence at The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Thomas Rain Crowe wrote about Scott T. Starbuck’s latest book forthcoming from Fomite Press, “Industrial Oz may just be the most cogent and sustained collection of quality eco-activist poetry ever written in this culture, this country.”  Activist Bill McKibben wrote, “Industrial Oz is . . . rousing, needling, haunting.” His blog Trees, Fish, and Dreams is at riverseek.blogspot.com