I have nothing to declare.
I am a crab in a tidepool on the beach you have rented access to for a week.
I am not the wind or the houses or the chairs.
I am the fish that sits at the head of the crab, where it used to have a claw.
I have nothing to wish for.
This silt and this pool and I will be washed back into the ocean
when the sun comes up.
Tomorrow or the next day or the next, you won’t be here,
but I might be—the crab and the fish filtering
whatever the moon allows.
For Robert Lee Brewer’s 2023 November PAD Chapbook Challenge Day 1: A declaration poem: https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/2023-november-pad-chapbook-challenge-day-1#:~:text=For%20the%202023%20November%20PAD,to%20write%20a%20declaration%20poem.