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