Mother

Author's Note: This poem has been modified from original to fit in the WritingML format. See "Mother (image)"  for a visual of what the true poem looks like in a booklet.




Mother

She—
has arisen proud and tall
throughout most of her entire life, tall,
parts of her becoming fuel for humans—
Left all summer to dry out, waiting to “cure”
as if she would be healed— then carefully handled on her way,
all nice and dry . . . . healed . . . into the fire, to become energy again.
Energy.

Long ago she gathered carbon dioxide from the air and returned oxygen,
started as a heretic nut, escaping the shell, rising and swaying with the current of many days.
Each year she shed her coat, dry light gatherers pampering her feet, feeding her babes or blowing—
tossing and turning across a clearing— all with a purposeless purpose,
to bed a seed or nourish another.
Nourishment.

To bed a seed that it may rise to the sky, in another adjacent age, rise to see the pink and violet flower
buds of many springs, to see yellow finches and green mother cardinals—
and their red brothers and their red lovers— the brilliance of mundane sparrows, to
see thousands of suns rise and fall, see the fall of older neighbors, to be mutilated later, by the humans.
Humans.

and then burned, to be returned again to smoke and energy, and carbon dioxide,
to feed a brother or a mother or a cousin—
she never groans in pain, when pecked by a pecker—
Woodpecker pecking.

She just stands there,
silently standing in the
breeze, uttering not a
word but the zephyrs
and cicadas song, no
complaint nor shrug,
lending her cavities,
just to house birds or
a family of squirrels,
who eat some of her
would-be off-spring,
but bury and fertilize many
others, heretical nuts; so that new
and green saplings will one day grow
up high to scratch at the sky, only to be
Mutilated— Mutilated. Mutilated— Mutilated.