Becoming Entities

Personhood blurs for persons
To the horizons in all
Directions—pet animals,

Corporate institutions,
Insects, hovering beings—
A radiant nimbus shifts

Its halo like a pot lid,
A dome of clouds, auroras,
Between nations and peoples.

Numbers of indigenous
Cultures and colonizers’
Own ancestors held persons

Or personlike entities
Inhered in all living things
And/or in the stones, as well.

Today’s nations are jealous
Of their personhoods, since rights
Have been invented. In some

Countries, legal disputes burn
In smoldering wildfire lines
Over what is a person.

Americans recently
Surveyed anthropomorphized
Commercial corporations—

How very American—
But only to the level
They anthropomorphized ants.

Want to know what people are?
Ask the talkers what they fear
Becoming. That’s what they are.