Animal Eden

It was the year of the viral video,
nature coming out of hiding.
We were supposed to believe
that within weeks, animal lives
had overwritten us with their joy
and reckless abandon, instincts
alerting them like radio waves
signalling through the ether that humans
were under quarantine and no one
knew how long. Elephants
who'd eaten Earth knows what,
forgot about - the human dangers,
perhaps consumed themselves
into a stupor of corn wine and laid out
in cultivated fields of tea leaves.
I hate to anthropomorphize,
but were those smiles that I saw on all
of their faces? With the predators
of the world gone gone - vanished -
the prey had reached an Earthly nirvana,
and it was heaven! Heaven on Earth!
Heaven at last! And some of us humans,
from the vantage point of our dark screens,
felt so good for having seen it.