Roadkill

While Walking in the back forty, perusing the forests for insights into the sublimity of nature, I came to see a large concrete block on the road with a mangled piece of roadkill on top. My first thoughts upon seeing this now dead co-inhabitant were of repulsion. Why would anybody want to touch that poor being that had now been lying on top of the cement for who-knows-how-long? What diseases and parsites had decided to invade that corpse in the meantime? Why disturb its rotting fate? Then I remembered Sherman Alexie's poem "Grandmother, Porcupine, Traffic", and how Big Mom

"Stopped
Traffic as she stepped in the road
And dragged the porcupine
From the Pavement...
The porcupine
Would always be a porcupine
No matter that its heart had stopped
It sharp quills were more useful than a road."

The respect Big Mom has for nature and animals really dawned on me. What a sad ending to such a noble creature as a porcupine, to be crushed by some cold steel automobile? In one of my other classes we were talking today about an African saying about snakes, that the ones who neglect to say their daily prayers will die before the night. Animals survive in the world by their own account. How much closer are they to nature by default? I really like the communion with nature Big Mom shares, and would like to be that in-tune myself. But alas, I still didn't give that roadkill its deserved respect. Another creature will go unused and under-appreciated,