The July Open Write on Ethical ELA begins today with host Mo Daley, who invites poets to “Consider the masks you or those around you might wear. Using a format of your choosing, write a poem about a mask or masks.”

My first thought in response, with masks being linked to ancient theatrical performances, was writing around Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…”

But then a little creature appeared in my head and ran the rest of it away.

Which may be for the best…

Mask Obscura

Raccoon was named
for the way it uses
its “hands”

rubbing and rinsing
its food
in water

not for the mask
forever typecasting Raccoon
as bandit-trickster
in human lore.

Unlike humans
these creatures know one another
by their individual masks

not donned as shields
or ritual
or protocol
or festivity
or theatrics
or deeds of darkness

but serving to
absorb light
in the night

to see

to survive.

Yet like humans
Raccoon covets shiny things

and can be trapped by them.

Hunters of yore
eventually learned
to cut holes in logs
to place a bit of tin inside
to hammer in nails
around the small circumference

knowing Raccoon
would be beguiled
would reach its hand inside
for the bright thing.

Once the fist is clenched
the creature will never let go
to set itself free…

in paradoxical symmetry
so does the creature
that named itself 
for its supreme intelligence.

Might it have been better named
for its own myriad masks
and motives, ever disguised?
Or for the hubris and folly
accounting for so much of its
own demise?

If only Raccoon
had the ability
to write,
there might be annals
of Ring-Tales
read aloud in the night
at a gathering deep in the forest
by crackling firelight:

To see or not to see*…
Lord, what ultimate Tricksters
these Homo sapiens be!
 
There in that circle, perhaps
with shivery spines
and whiskers a-tremble
they name us
not for our deeds or dominion
but for the way
we wash our hands.

—
*Note: The collective noun for raccoons is a gaze.

Procyon lotor (raccoon).jpg. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Procyon lotor is derived from Latin for “washer”