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# Mere Survival
- URL: https://www.andyposner.org/mere-survival-poem/
- Published: 2024-12-21T18:34:35.000Z
- Updated: 2024-12-21T18:34:35.000Z
- Description: It must take a certain manic energy, for an Arctic Tern to travel 25,000 miles a year, over every ocean and near every continent on Earth, as though there were no borders, no checkpoints, no...
- Author: Andy
- Tags: Be The Change, poetry, #Migrated-1784090317409, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-07-15 04:39

It must take a certain manic energy, for an Arctic Tern to travel  
25,000 miles a year, over every ocean and near every continent  
on Earth, as though there were no borders, no checkpoints, no  
pitched battles between uniformed dots moving insignificantly  
below. Or maybe it’s flamboyance, an embellishment like  
a flying buttress on a skyscraper. What it isn’t is mere survival.  
When the first Tern found its wings, 30-inches tip-to-tip, found  
the ease with which it could fly pole-to-pole, realized it had the  
power to defy darkness, it must have felt like I, that first  
time I uttered the word *poet*, awestruck that one could be  
so free of what seemed unalterable, immovable: the shackles  
we are told, and shown, we are born with, a life circumscribed  
by rules and edicts. A teacher once told me to get my head out  
of out of the clouds, to memorize the date King Ferdinand died;  
when I refused, he confiscated my copy of *Leaves of Grass*, yet  
I kept reciting the verse, openly, like a dare to confiscate poetry  
itself. He didn’t know I’m immortal, that I’ve only ever belonged with  
the Tern, not chasing the sun, like him, but, perched on a shelf of blue  
\-white ice, catching the warmth in my beak and swallowing it whole.