Or a Life in the Woods

Arboreal chauvinism precludes
Running off to join the feral horses
Descended from semi-domesticates

Of the Botai. Despite having evolved
In no small part on the grasslands yourselves,
If you can’t have a cave, you want forest.

Scary as the darkness is, woods and caves
Comfort you in some way bright grasslands don’t.
You don’t like to be exposed. Is that why

You struggle with freedom when you get it?
Every more or less free country ever
Has struggled to keep its freedoms, struggled

With the terror humans have of freedom,
With its exposures to the light and wind.
Again and again, on open prairies,

The bunker mentality sinks back in.
More gophers than horses, aren’t you, really,
As social animals go? Dig, dig, dig.