You Haven’t

Soil writes everything down; it uses dirt,
the slaked faithfulness of water mixed with wet earth,
grains, pebbles, and a few forgotten remnants left
behind by the past. It passes these words on to roots,
who take them in via the umbilical truth of child receding womb,
memorising each word through the secular profusion of
twigs, stems, leaves, and wood. A century or so later,
the words, having grown up to become sentences, stanzas, parables,
epics, give themselves to the freedom of evaporation, rising on the
illicit pleasures of the wind and the fluttering emancipation
of gathered clouds, bathing the land in that which was nearly
buried beneath the brusque hand of rule: of how orange tried to flood
our rivers and our homes, once upon a time; of how its crescendo
of odium and frenzy tried to swallow the songbird’s lament,
woven from diversified notes; of how its putrid breath tried to
demolish the pages of history, line by sacred line. A century or so later,
the words, having grown up to become sentences, stanzas, parables,
epics, give themselves to the freedom of evaporation, rising on the
illicit pleasures of the wind and the fluttering emancipation
of gathered clouds, bathing the land in that which was saved
by the wet fortitude of braver tongues: of how mahogany and
mahua came together to form barricades; of how tiger lilies,
lotuses, delilah, and temple magnolia dissolved previous sins
in the riparian tides of rise and roar; of how heirlooms and artefacts
and the insistent pull of photographic memory resuscitated breath
and blood into the streaming canals of previously deceased lungs.

A century or so later, the words will gather as proof of what
soil had once sowed. So if you think you’ve gotten away with it,
you haven’t.