Earthing

(quoted from T.S. Eliot’s “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Service”)
Mother may I come outside
for a quiet conversation?
You speak in tongues
of a thousand million years
potential death and listless decay,
words that I understand, endless dust
in the silent essence of today.
I have barely set foot yet
on your old, winding road;
I lost my way in my own conceit
an afternoon of wet sadness,
the question why? and thick sleep.
Now I press my bruised feet into
your widening belly of summer green.
All the evening birds chitter the songs
that today I forgot to sing.
Mother
thank you for the kind reminder.
My back is not my back, but
the trunk of a tree, my arms
not arms but branches
raised to thee.
My sorrow pours joy underneath
your wide wallowing sky.
Let me push my wayward fingers deep
into your scented soil, and lose
whatever I thought of as true.
Let me forget everything
that is not you.
Sparrows and robins sing away
the approaching night
hold blindness at bay
for one hour longer.
Just enough for me to sway
in my hammock of heart hunger
suspended by gentle trees
under the shade of leaves
slow in coming this year –
but come they did, stubbornly
a thousand million of them
as always they do,
nudging along reality’s
soft hard promise of fruit.
Words last one day, maybe two.
But
Mother
My heart lasts, and longs, and sings
for you.

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