On a walk in the prairie, I see him at some distance,
Head and neck raised above the grasses, the eyes of the grasslands.
No lizard or grasshopper, nor strolling human escapes his gaze,
And the chase is like watching a living shadow slipping silently
Through bluestem, flowers, and stones, agility and speed
In a slender serpentine form.

That chase is for the grasshopper, for the striped lizard sprinting for cover.
Never for the human, although we imagine it that way.
We see six feet of scales looking like a braided whip,
And we give him the name “Masticophis,” Greek for “whip snake,”
And see him through the lens of our own lives – “he’ll whip you!”
We barely see him at all.

It doesn’t matter what a coachwhip looks like to us.
I wish we could know him the way the prairie knows him.