Meet Me in the Woods

the reclamation.

at first,
we hadn't noticed it.
it began
as subtly as we had;
a heavier rain than usual,
pounding against our high kingdoms
of concrete and glass and asphalt.
a stray dandelion,
straining for sunlight
between two cinder blocks.

we designed it,
in a way,
this ballad of destruction.
black northern roads
left to disregard
fell, were swallowed whole,
consumed, by insatiable rivers,
and they became
continental plates,
rising and falling,
making way for the
eve's slumber
of tadpoles and trout.

a plains farmhouse,
where mary was
the eldest of seven
dust bowl children,
was overtaken
by the triumphant return
of prairie grasses,
red admirals,
white and pink asters,
coyotes and bison,
all kingdom come to claim
the mother land.
they are fed by the soil
that holds mary's
nondescript tomb,
beside a crumbling
sinking ford truck,
pulled into the ground
by otherworldly artifacts.

the french trenches
of the great war
are now only divots in a meadow.

nature,
in her divine, feminine rage
and feminine kindness,
was assuredly, violently,
and slowly,
reclaiming eden
for the rest of her brood.

fear no demons,
and suffer no masters,
cried the chained animals
of social media and
tourist temptation,
as they devoured
the hands that would no longer
stand to feed them.

then,
come climate change;
a world run by fossil fuels
and ancient fools,
to drown in the twisted
foils of all their sins,
a tartarus breaking up
from the soil.

hurricanes,
with manes of lightning
and ocean-born fury,
with winds of broken bones,
with rains of frigid arctic seas
and micro-plastics.
hurricanes,
to level the luxury beach houses
of barren glass and empty pavement.
hurricanes,
to make martyrs of the shore,
to deliver the great flood
of death and birth.

wildfires of the west,
raging, crackling
feeding upon aspens
and spruces,
for whence the soil
shall be plentiful
after we are gone.

oil rigs,
collapsed into the sea
by ungodly waves,
the tar pushing
those unnatural puzzles pieces
into the shape
of crucifixion.

she has deemed us
unworthy
of bearing witness
to the reconstruction;
to the reclamation.
there shall be nothing
and there shall be everything.

now, a lone rider,
(as three companions
have since completed
their most wretched of prophecies)
within a forest
born of dandelions
between cinder blocks,
traversing a collapsed kingdom
entombed beneath
a heavenly grave
of new mosses
new creeks
and new redwoods.

a lone rider,
wandering amongst ruins
a global, reborn chernobyl,
a new song
of new sparrows
sings him to sleep.