Returning

I
I left the swollen mother
with dirt still 'neath my nails
and
dreams of ivory and wine
that she could not provide

her bright blue morning sighs
golden grain-hair whisperings on windy breath
salt-sweet tears that
cascaded condemnation upon me
torrential,
for raping her rich
green-dark body
as I erupted out in flight

—these memories yet burden me,
and still I walk into the fiery dusk
avoid the circling eye,
caked in mud.

II
         They came from the trees and from the earth, naked and afraid. Suckled on sweet mother's milk that soured in their stomachs and drove them mad with the desire for something more filling. They ripped into the dirt, ploughed it up and away and out of their memories, and when they found the stores of tin and copper and iron they sucked it all up, sucked until their bellies were stretched too tight and simply burst. And out ran rivers of metal giants, gleaming, thrashing monsters, and out also were vomited forests of hot shining alloys that broiled in the repugnant sun and filled the air with the high, thin scent of progress.
         These trees spring up faster than those of the native dirt can compensate. The earth, parched, frail, sends its ashes into the wind, into the sky, a cry for help. But no water comes where these bronze kings sit atop their steel thrones. They breathe easily behind their spotless titanium walls, and when they look outside upon the barren earth, dying alone and afire in the unforgiving light of its own brother sun, they do not understand what they are seeing.
         It is as if they have forgotten entirely.

III
         Deep down some shadowy, silent, inner-city alley, a bum named Raymond slept beneath a cardboard lean-to. He had had a last name once, but he had long since forgotten it. And, really, did it matter? His face was crinkled leather with a fine yellow dust highlighting all the creases. Water in his rheumy eyes, bits of browning straw stuck in his tangled mess of stringy, greasy hair. And dirt beneath his nails.
         The summer sun bounced off the glimmering skyscrapers and beat down hot on his feet, which stuck out the other side of the lean-to. Raymond muttered something in his slumber and rolled onto his side, drew his feet in, and pressed his face against—what?
         His eyes snapped open. He had been expecting to find beneath his cheek the scaly, scratchy concrete that he was so used to. But when he looked, what he saw, wholly to his astonishment, was a gaping chink in the pavement, through which a fine mat of springy green had pushed through.
         A thin film glazed his rheumatic eyes, and he sniffled, coughed, sneezed. "I on'y heard 'bout these things in books. . . ." he murmured. And he peered slackjawed at this little spit of grass.
         There, in the very middle of this miniature rebellion, a tiny flower with red-orange petals, the color of a fired sunset sky long since dead to memory, stood up tall and indignant.
         Raymond whistled through what teeth he had left and gingerly stretched out a dirt-encrusted finger to fondle, with wonder abounding, this loveliest of threats.