Here is what is wrong with us:
even after we realized
that salmon swim home
for regeneration and death;
even then, this great mystery
of Nature, repeated and
repeated, did not awe us
to the point of
wondrous celebration.
We sang no songs,
we danced no dances,
to acknowledge the gift
of what we saw,
of what we couldn't explain;
we did nothing to help
the salmon on their way.
Quite the contrary.
With dams and pollution,
with commercial over-fishing,
on river after river,
we built obstacles against which
the salmon's mysterious journey
became more difficult and
less successful, as if
something about it made us
uneasy, defensive, needing
to change Nature instead of
celebrating it, singing, dancing;
instead we celebrated what
we called progress, built on
the corpses of struggling,
failing salmon. After all,
a fish is just a fish --
but look, electric lights
are everywhere!
But Nature is one
big family, and salmon
have many relatives.
What we did to salmon,
salmon's cousins now do
to us: hurricane and tornado,
flood and drought,
storms beyond storms
as the salmon's cousins
make clear the central
theme of Family:
if you mess with one of us,
you mess with us all.
