The bud, newly broken,
does not care.
The virus, freely spreading,
does not care.
Each of them opens
into blossom,
trying to replicate,
as we do.
What is crisis to us,
is to them being.
The black spider
on the pale rock
hunts for blood.
That is what it does.
José A. Alcántara lives in Western Colorado. He has worked as a bookseller, mailman, commercial fisherman, baker, carpenter, studio photographer, door-to-door salesman, and math teacher. His poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, Rattle, and the anthologies, 99 Poems for the 99%, and America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience.