WEBVTT

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So this next poem is
really all over the map.

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It has lots of things in
it, and because you only

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get to hear it once--
you know, on the page,

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you can reread things,
but you're only

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going to hear it once, so
I'm just going to warn you.

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We have the International
Space Station in the title.

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We have evolution.

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We have the
geomorphology of Florida.

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We have the asteroid that
took out the dinosaurs.

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We have the civil war in Syria
and terrorism in general.

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And at the end of the poem--

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this had been going on
for years when I wrote it,

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and it is still in the
news regularly now--

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the crisis of the refugees
in the Mediterranean.

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"Day Beginning with Seeing
the International Space

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Station and a Full Moon
Over the Gulf of Mexico

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and All Its Invisible Fishes."

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"None of this had to happen.

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Not Florida.

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Not the ibis's beak.

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Not water.

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Not the horseshoe crab's
empty body and not

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the living starfish.

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Evolution might have
turned left at the corner

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and gone down another
street entirely.

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The asteroid might have missed.

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The seams of limestone
need not have

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been susceptible to
sand and mangroves.

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The radio might have
found a different music.

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The hips of one man
and the hips of another

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might have stood beside each
other on a bus in Aleppo

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and recognized themselves
as long-lost brothers.

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The key could have
broken off in the lock,

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and the nail-can
refused its lid.

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I might have been the fish
the brown pelican swallowed.

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You might have been the way
the moon kept not setting

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long after we thought it would,
long after the sun was catching

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inside the low wave curls
coming in at a certain angle.

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The light might not have been
eaten again by its moving.

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If the unbearable
were not weightless,

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we might yet buckle
under the grief

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of what hasn't changed yet.

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Across the world,
a man pulls a woman

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from the water, from which the
leapt-from overfilled boat has

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entirely vanished.

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From the water pulls
one child, another.

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Both are living, and both
will continue to live.

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This did not have to happen.

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No part of this had to happen."

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