Wednesday, June 27, 2012

poetry as a lesson in botany

We have grown fond of these:
Lifting the dry bark off a trunk,
Being forlorn as flowers in the rain.

But let’s keep in mind the evenness
Of the latter’s blooming wounds
Like Earth’s fragile mouths in chorus.

See, we are in mute obedience to life
When this patch of grass pushes
Through the pores of our clothes.

Rarely do we ever hear
The safeties of a mushroom.
We only have consequences,

Since nobody would root for pain
The way things endure
In the last tundra of the century.

Nobody would ever tell us, too,
Of the dandelion seed in wanderlust,
Of the alga deprived of its place.

We just need to know because
Aren’t we always in search of trees?
Knowledge, life, family.

Branches reaching for next
To nothing but conviction:
This word, this light, this touch.

This fruit that could be poison.
Heres a grain of rice fresh
From its husk. Look at it closely.

Look at how finite, how inept it is
In its solitude and crudeness.
Look at what we have done.

2 comments:

Petr said...

Wonderful poem!!

Bullfrog said...

Thank you, Petr.