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.