Obituary for our Earth

“A cloud never dies.” – Theme for the seven-day service for Thich Nhat Hanh in California

Earth – pronounced dead

Remains gathered in a peacock’s plume.
Stained like the ink of signed petitions on
her electric feathers, as blue as peacock blue.
Each vein pigmented meticulously, feathers fanning
rhythms of the earth. A grotesque dance rises
from the stillness of tombstones, each tombstone as
flat as the hollow sound of bones without ashes. Weep
ing in her belly, hope, like the cacophonous buzzing of a
beehive, gathered in equitable patterns. Thick air is picking
on lashes of grief like flicked strings mocking a cello. Graves
wrapped with wreaths of words, each wreath is bound together
by bone dry remains of trees. Each branch above crackling like a
funeral pyre of combustible wood. Hyenas arrive in a riot of howls
the forest becoming a bustum. Spiders insist on weaving loss into the
crevices of beaded breath, poised at the asphalt edge of mankind’s loss

Inscribed – into the emptiness left behind

Savage man still grasping at the lesson of listening
calling attention to the scarcity of my broken spine
each vertebra dead, yet thirsting to sprout anew. If
the man and his brood pause from a never-ending
revelry. If man and his hunger eat the nectar of my
oozing wounds. If man wraps my shivering skies in
to his selfish arms. If men carry me on shoulders to
the bowl of an eternal ocean, then bringing me home.
It rains in places that are as dry as an infant’s cheeks.
Borrow some ash from Thay’s grave and sprinkle it
across my calloused chest, capture my nimble breaths.