The Adventurer Addresses The Institute For Exploration Poem by Daniel Brick

Inspired by Othello's Monologue Act I.3, l.128-169

My trusted colleagues and sponsors,
Alone, I have walked calmly and swiftly
through the larger world this Institute
is pledged to protect. I have swum
in lakes of warm yellow waters, home
to dozens of predators and prey, myself
a cunning visitor. I have crossed mighty
rivers at flood-tide as if by magic. Hills
and mountains posed no obstacles, I leaped
to their summits and raced through their
valleys. Water-falls and fire-falls crashed
in my path. Clouds thick enough to roll in
carried me across the pink sky at dawn,
red-orange clouds at night covered my sleep.
I saw huge storms of lightning in dry deserts,
I watched from low hills fires ravage prairies
that stretched for hundreds of miles. These things
I witnessed and recorded, and never was I fatigued
or fearful or depressed. The journey itself restores
needed strength... In low places and on plateaus,
I communed with familiar and strange beasts, whose
howls, bellows, whines, whose whistles, cries and
songs were eloquent past imagining. And I replied
by reciting Shakespeare and Yeats, and we bonded.
The animals nestled against my body when they sensed
my departure, and I shed human tears over their hides,
fur and skin, when I embraced them at departure.
Such were the adventures of a lone man returning
to the community of nature. All forms of natural life
accepted me in these times of natural peril. How will
we answer their curiosity, their wonder, their companionship?