Rattlesnake Allegory

“Mesquites”

In a field a plethora of mesquites grew.

Rampantly, some of them unruly. Wildness

and fending off shames. Shames? you may ask.

For being bent, for shaping in unnatural ways.

It was said. And so it was—.

But magic, for none of these were trees

in the sense that trees should take root

and not tremble or growl or know Love

for one other. Water and wind. Earth,

Light. Saplings, thus groves. And some spread

their seed pods for the sole sake of giving them

up or taking another’s seed. And pleasure

and wildness—. Earth and Light.

And this was the world.

Then. Something emerged

among the mesquites. And overcome,

unprepped, how the mesquites suffered—.

Over time, seed pods grew strange, dire.

The field soon became a field.

People witnessed. Mesquites began

gradually, forthwith, to die off—.

So many of them. No one

could halt that suffering, though so many tried.

And distance and Grief—.

And heavy murk where once fullness

and Joy, and Wonder. A sad hymn

of sinews: mottled shadows, emptiness—.

For years, the hymn hummed.

Harrowed, the field knew somberness

as if it were wind and Light,

the field knew erosion and understood

what loss uttered to its bones: the spirits

of every bird and the tall yellow grasses,

the souls of all the mosses

and the armadillos

digging grubs from the most tender soils,

the little deer

who relied on the mesquites

for shade, the coyotes who satisfied hungers

with the pods—. For many years, then: loss,

affliction, tribulation, woe…