lichen

My son knew that lichen is not one,

but two in one, many in one:

chance seeded in chance.

I stare at it now with different questions.

The maps in my classroom were Victorian,

the wrongness of maps

became taken for granted.

Through my life,

the rest of the 'taken for granted',

and the violence and cruelty that took it,

like a submerged world, resurfaces.

Our debt washed on our shores

in the broken bodies of those we do not choose

to see.