PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Every night the sea is something new.

Sometimes it is lavishly empty,

finding its own light within 

and other nights

the moon cracks open on a sheet of indigo

—water and sky are one—

ebony and raging snow,

love and loneliness

and that plastic bottle

and an ocean more somewhere

choking what is left of our indigo dreams.

Every day the forest is born 

and when I am here I have everything I need:

its lungs breathe for me, 

its beauty blazes inside me like

the end of days,

but joy is not quite here yet, just

peering through the black eyes of

the tangled path.

All these thoughts of endings.

Around the world 

these living meditations,

these wooden poems,

these temples

are condemned like medieval heretics,

consumed in greater agony than the

red hunger of a swollen eastern sky

without an audience.

I don't know when I began to miss

the luxury of not knowing

and always feeling that I

was home,

I only know that we killed

our mother while she was still

teaching us about the strange galaxies

inside each handful of soil and the

sorcery of acorns and mornings dripping pine

and mossy happiness that kiss us into

awareness when nothing else could make

us want another day.

She lived a fierce and beautiful life:

tyranny and majesty,

an old soul and an infant,

and broke off every piece of herself

to the looting wolves inside us

and here we are wondering why the 

sky is screaming

while she bleeds ice and fire

and we realize we may never leave

this shiny new carnival-world

where we may never again fly without wings

upon the scent of glassy mornings

or float away on oceans that dream

uninterrupted by fragments of our 

plastic lives

or see the stars as they truly are

or drink or breathe

without questioning

or simply feel that we have everything we need.

Now who will feed us the wild, leafy air?

Who will sing us to life 

when the doe-eyed forest

fails to speak?

Patricia Joan Jones