Do you see this green stem?

How can they reason that the water from the soil travels up,

If they can’t believe that we too, will one day ascend?

 

And do they not know that the rain that comes down

brings with it, the whisperings of the dead?

Acid rain to warn us of repeating our ancestral mistakes.

 

Do you see how the sheep does not fear the pious farmer

as he brings forth his sharpened tool?

The sheep knows well what is to come,

& even when the flock runs, and the sheep has its chance to escape, it stays.

For the prayers recited before its slain will stretch themselves into a string of words on judgment day.

&  even the sheep know what route is best to follow.

What is death ordained by the pious farmer, but a life simply tracing its destiny with the ink of honor?

***

Look at me. No, not with your eyes.

Don’t you recognize me from a past life?

Nothing of our circumstance is convenient.

But if a river didn’t flow steady, I wouldn’t drink.

& if the ocean always drew closer to the sun in her waves,

the people on boats would grieve.

 

Born of different garments but of the same cloth.

Colors of your wisdom are in harmony with the patterns of my complexity,

laying themselves on the ground for those who will walk after our time.

What greater thing to share in common,

than the thread that sews our carpet?

& like the one in my mother’s living room,

It possesses the beauty that invokes dreams of sand and bottles of incense perfume,

for the soldier who touches it in Burma,

& the maid who sweeps over it in Khartoum.

 

When tea with sugar is offered to you, remember me.

You are bound to no one, so live freely, but you’re a person of their word,

and it is you who proclaimed that

 the sun doesn’t shift from its axis.

So until you recite otherwise, I will trust it–

anticipating the day when the sun meets the ocean in the decreed sunset.