It is quiet in dark places.
Through a crack comes the smell of food.
Without volition, the cockroach moves
with a swiftness that’s been honed for ages.
Sometimes one of the brotherhood
is caught by sudden light, halfway back home.
Ancestral memory of man
awakens. The cockroach, handless,
knows somewhat of hands.
There is a laden silence.
A wasp, in such a situation, panics,
blunders into walls, at last attacks.
A fly would be long gone.
But calm as one
who’s been in tight spots before,
the cockroach waits, being nothing but aware.
When the shoe falls, the roach is no longer there.
Three things have sustained the roach through every era:
a fondness for copulation;
a taste for garbage;
and a stillness that unnerves predation
by saying: Look: this too is Buddha
This too
This too is Buddha.