elephant pace
squishing flowers
poppies, red
field
Post Script
This poem can be read as a quiet study of movement and totality.
The elephant does not rush, and it does not hesitate. Its pace is steady, natural, without self-consciousness. In this way, it mirrors a kind of grounded awareness—one that is not trying to preserve or avoid, but simply moving as it is.
And yet, flowers are crushed.
From a conventional view, this introduces tension. We might ask whether the elephant should step more carefully, or whether something delicate has been lost. But the poem does not enter that frame. It does not assign fault or seek resolution.
Instead, it widens.
The red of the poppies draws attention to the immediacy of what is touched—life, color, fragility. But even this is not held. It opens into the field.
The field is not separate from the elephant, nor from the flowers, nor from the act of crushing. It contains all of it without preference. Nothing stands outside it, and nothing is excluded.
In this way, the poem gestures toward a perspective in which awareness does not remove consequence, and compassion does not require control. Movement, contact, and change are not interruptions to the field—they are expressions of it.
What appears as disturbance at one scale may be continuity at another.
The poem does not ask the reader to resolve this. It simply places them there.
Primitive Joe 