File:American Goldfinch - Election Poem by Alfred LaMotte below-.jpg

English: ELECTION — a poem by Alfred K. LaMotte:

I voted.

I voted for the rainbow.

I voted for the cry of a loon.

I voted for my grandfather’s bones that feed beetles now.

I voted for a singing brook that sparkles under a North Dakota bean field.

I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies South along the shores of two continents.

I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth.

I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam, and the old democracy of worms.

I voted for the wordless treaty that cannot be broken by white men or brown, because it is made of star semen, thistle sap, hieroglyphs of the weevil in prairie oak.

I voted for the local, the small, the brim that does not spill over, the abolition of waste, the luxury of enough.

I voted for the commonwealth of the ancient forest, a larva for every beak, a wing-tinted flower for every moth’s disguise, a well-fed mammal’s corpse for every colony of maggots.

I voted for open borders between death and birth.

I voted on the ballot of a fallen leaf of sycamore that cannot be erased, for it becomes the dust and rain, and then a tree again.

I voted for more fallow time to cultivate wild flowers, more recess in schools to cultivate play, more leisure, tax free, more space between days.

I voted to increase the profit of evening silence and the price of a thrush song.

I voted for ten million stars in your next inhalation.