bliss station ~ poetry

the god of there are no mammoths anymore

after Neil Gaiman's poem, "The Mushroom Hunters" (linked in the media above)

there is a book lying by an anthill which reads the book

on the way to the mountain too thin to be an encyclopedia.

I used to think women could talk to plants, that mushrooms

are sadder older plants at an age where you prefer umbrellas

to the usual wet rain, retired-sort, not that my mother could

mushroom-chat - the women I thought of were in cave books.

men hunted mammoths & women gathered mushrooms

is what I thought I thought but what I knew was that

men gathered mammoths & women hunted mushrooms.

made more sense that way, men could only do what

the mammoths let them do, give chase, stick a piece

of ivory like an insult to injury as it ran off to die.

I stoop to see the mushrooms at the back of my mother's

garden rise to discover language again in her motherese.

did big die like small, on a scale of one to ten, how similar

is a sparrow's dirge to a whale's before it sinks, or beaches

or flies away to where men made gods out of the let them do?

the god of mammoths falling down a cliff, the god of

mammoths overheating & tiring, the god of mammoths

being run over on their way to the grocery but the women

hunted mushrooms, which now I knew were not retired

plants but something primal, a tribe of plants unconverted

to sun-worship - enlightened in the dark women hunted.

the book by the hill is too thin to be an encyclopedia

& the ants too tiny to occupy a mountain of their own

by themselves - only humans no longer gather or hunt

but in a way we do - listening for the breezy motherese.

~ Ajay
8/12/2019