when the bayou rose above
the waugh st bridge
 
in the daylight flood
 
bats asleep underneath
drowned in the thousands
 
tiny free-tailed bats
 
ears cupped for echo
 
roosted seven layers
deep in the concrete trap
 
is sentience
the wonder of sonar
 
or knowledge of pain?
 
the rain erased the sun
I wept in the dark
 
cars in the flooded lot
hidden like alligators
 
*
 
one summer at twilight
sometime later
 
I visit the bats of waugh st
 
who have syllable
acoustics and
skin glands that rub
 
this bridge and no other
with the odor of home
 
I lie on the grassy bank
near the bridge
in a crowd of my species
 
children’s voices echo
 
and the trees open
their arms to the wind
 
is sentience
a hurricane radar
 
or knowledge it will
happen again?
 
three hundred thousand bats
 
drown out traffic
 
each the weight
of a pencil
 
writing parabolas in the dusk

—

Henk Rossouw is from Cape Town, South Africa. His book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize. His poems have been featured in literary journals such as POETRY and The Paris Review. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Henk received tenure in 2023 at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he serves as the Co-Director of the UL Lafayette Creative Writing Program. He’s an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly and a consulting editor for the African Poetry Book Series at the University of Nebraska Press.