Travel guides always want
to send me to museums of art,
of history, of culture, of science.
I appreciate their guidance but I
would prefer to spend my time
visiting zoos, looking at animals
and ignoring the placards
painfully detailing what I am seeing.
I have been to countless
museums and while each offered
beauty and knowledge, each
demanded that I needed to learn,
to interpret, to absorb.
In zoos I can again become
the child I have long forgotten,
the one that was stripped away
from me by war and education.
In zoos I can watch the animals
watching me neither of us certain
which of us is the more risible
and none of us caring which of us is.
In our world fraught with division,
under a perpetual cloud of war,
in a world threatening to melt away
in a zoo, for a few hours, I
can revert to the simple joy
that only childhood provides.