Poetry has the ability to engage all our senses. This poem by Camille Dungy, two-time recipient of the Northern California Book Award, and currently a professor at San Francisco State University.is one I love and wanted to share. To see more of her work you as well as many other tasty poems visit poets.org

Characteristics of Life
by Camille Dungy

A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.
-BBC Nature News
Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you
I speak for the snail.
speak of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
of life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.

I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
I speak
from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.

Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you
one thing today and another tomorrow
and I will be as consistent as anything alive
on this earth.

I move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in
your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter
all day.

Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent
as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful
and useless if that’s all you know to ask of me.

Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of
distances
between meadows of night-blooming flowers.
I will speak
the impossible hope of the firefly.

You with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must
understand
such wordless desire.

To say it is mindless is missing the point.