Is it wrong to love this world like a newborn swaddled
in peach skin, beech-tree bark, silt at the mouth of a
stream whose headwater is starlight, is ocean-honey,
is upwell of grief? World we once called mother, how
we have aged you, your fires and floods unfamiliar now,
your Tradewinds sighs of grief, signs of awful things come
to pass: you are as though reborn in our image, gods who
invented gods to quiet our minds and yet the ground shakes,
stampede of dreams buzzing in our ears, ancestors wagging
their fingers, terror staring us in the face and always, always
we look away. O world, we know not how to raise you, we
thought our plows were for plowing and not for healing, but
look at this sickness, how we felled the tree whose fruit bore
the cure. Every society is three meals away from chaos, said
Lenin; and we are suckling the desiccated soil, singing lullabies
to hurricanes as if children did exactly as they were told.
