Mother Earth In Desperation
Our mother has been sucked dry,
her blood cracks on our lips, our snake-like
tongue languidly licking
canines
sinking
into passion fruit, we eat her.
Crude.
We drink her up, gurgle and spit.
Rude.
We stomp forward down her hills,
stab her with drills,
she whimpers, clenching in silence,
then teeth scrape
with anger,
biting nails,
back of her throat fighting against vocal cords,
her green limbs shake and thrust up to the sky.
Pressed down, she winces and
contracts in pain as we
keep
digging into her breast for her milk.
Scratching through her pubic forest for wood to burn
to turn to green paper,
we venerate no longer, our mother
but that
through voices of birds and forces of winds,
she screeches
for help,
shackled mouth yelps
drowning in petroleum
tree trunks ashes in fire
yet incessantly,
she screams
squirming
struggling to breathe
under our technological ropes.
Like parasites we destroy our own source,
bite our womb and
bend down for the new deity,
perfect, rectangular, crisp
it shapeshifts like her:
instead of from winds,
to trees, to chirps, to waves,
it’s from fives, to tens, to fifties, to thousand.
With these numbers crumpled up in our grasp,
we walk home,
claws sinking into the soft,
concave belly of the mother.
“Are you proud of us?” we ask her.
And the
ground trembles, crumbles,
skies start to cry, in reply
and we wryly
wonder why.
Not a single whisper guessing it’s the pain
we inflict as we cut
that umbilical cord between us
and our green mother,
for that piece of paper.
Eventually, she will flail her arms back, giving up,
rolling into herself like a baby,
as her own
hand-woven creations cut her stitches
fry her moss, mountain,
fresh-water meat.
She will sit silent,
waiting for death.
Her kingdom is falling.
And we’re hungry wolves. watching
breathing heavily.
-Anthea Y.
Whimsical Thread 