(Published in the February, 2023, issue of Compass Rose Literary Journal )
Harvesting Stars
Roots carry
starlight into the earth;
leaves turn to the heavens
without remorse.
Plant-life is surely our pointing-out
instruction.
But how can we aspire to such
pristine equanimity?
Answers come
before such questions form.
The one and precious life
weighs the sun. I told you so.
I told you the green promise will lift us.
Regret, frankly, is a shadow
of what light once was.
The earth turns around
and night and day drain our secrets.
The ambrosia falling out of time
feeds the devils waiting under us,
wearing leaden boots.
Symbiotic lost and found.
Starlight, root, leaf – taste the sweet lie
time tells!
We scrape through woody yokes
to turn to the sky’s skeleton too.
We invent time and space
to cover our tracks.
We pack air and water
on the raft of questions.
There is great heaviness next
to the fire and metal
we take from the text.
Take to plan next steps.
Next steps on water.
We grow contexts.
But if we want to be like plants
we must be ready
to lighten the load by sacrifice.
Our seed will blow
away before we are sown
into the unknown.
Nothing in us
remembers. We can’t change
earth, water and metal
into fire.
We forget instead,
and the silence of forgetting
brings the rain
and then soon
we sheaf the stars
grown from the deluge.
leaves turn to the heavens
without remorse.
Plant-life is surely our pointing-out
instruction.
But how can we aspire to such
pristine equanimity?
Answers come
before such questions form.
The one and precious life
weighs the sun. I told you so.
I told you the green promise will lift us.
Regret, frankly, is a shadow
of what light once was.
The earth turns around
and night and day drain our secrets.
The ambrosia falling out of time
feeds the devils waiting under us,
wearing leaden boots.
Symbiotic lost and found.
Starlight, root, leaf – taste the sweet lie
time tells!
We scrape through woody yokes
to turn to the sky’s skeleton too.
We invent time and space
to cover our tracks.
We pack air and water
on the raft of questions.
There is great heaviness next
to the fire and metal
we take from the text.
Take to plan next steps.
Next steps on water.
We grow contexts.
But if we want to be like plants
we must be ready
to lighten the load by sacrifice.
Our seed will blow
away before we are sown
into the unknown.
Nothing in us
remembers. We can’t change
earth, water and metal
into fire.
We forget instead,
and the silence of forgetting
brings the rain
and then soon
we sheaf the stars
grown from the deluge.