Renewal, durability, adaptation

It's a late spring this year here in Portland, Oregon. We had sleet yesterday and expect frost again tonight. Nonetheless, green tips are poking up and now and then a song sparrow gets ahead of himself and hollers for love and territory. It's hard to be optimistic during our cold gray winters, easier now that the days are longer. I'm moved to show you a poem of hope, about how our fellow denizens can sometimes find ways to live with us without our encouragement or even awareness.

Let me know what you think.

ACCOMMODATION

Rabbits gone now, coyotes batten on dachshunds and cats
Nurtured in houses colonizing scalped hills.
How to explain these night nests of peculiar apes,
Proliferating absurdly, linked by hard black trails?

Inexplicable fauna, we trot down into gaping crevices
Where shrieking boxes halt and accept us.
Below the grimy platform, safe beside the third rail,
Flit grimy mice, salvaging hot dog scraps.

Twenty years ago Chernobyl slipped in our hand
And, bloodied, we dropped it and left.
Now black storks clack in the young forest
And half-poisoned wolves play with their cubs.