A Lesson.

How can any little piece of this life be worthless

When the smallest needle breaking from its branchy shell

Gathering beads of perspiration from the hot air

Can hold my attention?

We love to live in eithers, in ors

We impossibly seek destinations, or paths that lead directly, while ignoring the only path we cannot truly choose

The one that wears to a canyon under the friction of our footsteps,

Ever harder to scale the rising walls as we wallow

Eventually crumbling into the deepening sand to join our fathers

Dust to frost the landscape that sons will tread.

But to say that we rot in lonely graves

Is to have learned nothing of the warm lesson in gravity

Embracing, checking our frantic flight,

Our mother drawing her ancient, recycled children to her (cocooned

from abysmal and howling darkness

invited to sleep upon her warm pastures

drink her dew,

return our borrowed bodies in time).

But to think

That she will not cast us out,

Our angry mother

When we have sucked her dry

(It is already begun

irreversibly

so unlike the tide)

To believe ourselves forever held

Is to deny our colossal, impending destiny.

And despite our flying toy ships,

The cleverness in our hands,

We are only children

(tiny/ephemeral/protected)

Selflessly by the mother that is in every other who has carried us

Flickering even behind the paper lids of new life upon soft sheets

Screaming in harmony with the cries of a birthing room

More fragile or faded sometimes

Fanged like a wolf in others.

Even the horizon is feminine,

When it can be seen liberated from the heaving thighs of mountains

Or deep and muffled forest,

And to learn that this green world works in curves and blurring lines

To worship her,

Our swollen and suspended mother,

To love dripping life as we do the skin that covers our bones,

That is our lesson.