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The old man
must have stopped our car
two dozen times to climb out
and gather into his hands
the small toads blinded
by our lights and leaping,
live drops of rain.

The rain was falling,
a mist about his white hair
and I kept saying
you can’t save them all,
accept it, get back in
we’ve got places to go.

But, leathery hands full
of wet brown life,
knee deep in the summer
roadside grass,
he just smiled and said
they have places to go to
too.

By Joseph Bruchac, published in Unsettling America:  An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry,edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, and published by Penguin Books in 1994. Bruchac is a writer and storyteller whose work often reflects his Abenaki Indian ancestry and the Native worldview.