Source Code

Of course, I was birthing galaxies and stirring your primordial soup

and depositing twists of copper in my long, winding veins.

I rearranged the earth’s huge plates ‘til they crunched and thrust up mountains.

This has always been my elegant intent. Your awe and sacred trust.

I do this all for you (as Mothers often do).

At the edge of yesterday, as Sky, I changed into my spectral robes

of apricot, fuschia and a splash of cornflower blue, I made that whole display

just to comfort you so small and toiling down beneath my

long-forgotten moon.

When your eyes are still filled with 5am dew, before the coffee's tanned

its metal spoon, before the car takes over its daily route, and you clock into

some familiar room where your factory friends in gloves and shields

smelt the ore you tore from beneath my soil-skin

to bend and rivet and send onto runways your birds of aluminum, tails gray

with exhaust that coats the lungs of fern and bright cockatiel.

I understand your strivings, all your resplendent ideas:

your rocket to Mars and demanding clocks, your mother-

boards forged from my metal stores, your circuitry mazes like hamster wheels,

your pyramids dazzling, human building blocks that house your eternal

Aspirations. Egypt, Rome, I’ve seen them all.

They rise, they fall. They rise, they fall.

Ladders to eternity are only ladders still,

as Mother waters your fallow fields.

I offer you My river-veins

rich with ancestral silt for you to honor sacred ways,

with Sun electric, Earth magnetic, meditations keep earth-circuits connected. But

your factories churn and thrusters boom and children rush out of their schools

to huddle in their shuttered rooms

alone save

the chill of the blue screen light.

Somewhere, offshore,

pelicans slip and strain to lift their bills from the oil threatening to engulf them.

The old rig groans at the seventeen fissures that were noted then struck

from three board meeting agendas, while roughnecks hold their flasks and laugh

beneath a bare, swinging bulb.

Above, the clouds hang impotent with sorrow.

Above the clouds, I sigh your lullaby.