Lindsay L. O'Connor

Noted

The sounds of the chickens next door

remind me of a morning

I woke up in Africa.

There are chickens

all over the world, of course,

but the gentle clucks of the ones

in Ilmamen, Kenya

all those years ago

are the ones

I listened and paid attention to,

soaking in every sensory detail

of a place I’ll probably never see again.

And to think

I only had to fly

18 hours away

to pay attention.

Maybe what we crave

when we crave travel

isn’t just the change in location,

but the change in who we become

when we begin to pay attention.