11. each day

we breathe the slow rise of mountains and the solemn sway of glaciers giving way to disappearance

we are combed clean by gravity, pulling at coat tails with the persistent wonder of a child's urging to kneel down and play, with the enduring quicksand of remembering we are tethered to the ash and bone of every body we have loved and lost and hurt and forgotten 

we are hoisted into the sky each dawn on the backs of a billion stars, hands clasped
in spiral merging, in one ball of unrelenting invincibility to the blaze we are forged from

we are shipped down into melodic caves of void on the cool shoots of moonshine 

we are a storehouse of seeds, cataloging each scar into longing, each conception piled against the boundary of a lifetime, we are a womb crowded in readiness, still skirting the gentle fist of the midwife

we are dissolved like a single salt crystal on the smooth tongue of the ocean untraceably swallowed in her vast body of splendor and spit out in a lineage of reaching for the nibbling quiet of oxygen and sand 

we are opening the soft net of decay beneath a glistening stream of renewal, the fields of our still unburied dead stuffed in torn pockets and littering our wake

we are feeding our young leathery life lessons chewed into gentleness before passed through the unblemished faith of expectant lips, we are dropping our leaves, laying down our limbs in relentless effort to shelter our seedlings from the sharp edge of our limitations 

we are spinning light into skin, chasing a translucent chlorophyll reflection keeping time with the quick step of shedding

we are tracing a hologram of memory that outlives every molecule, neuron and chemical bond that makes us known to ourselves

we are a molten center that never stops warming, never stops trying to comfort all of her children, we are stuffing our sweat glands with carbon and resentment, blaming the enduring love of our earth mother for our forgetting how to fall in her arms and weep, and shake and break the fever of separation

we are standing at a crossroads, every old growth wisdom crumbling linear time to lay open before us, every dead end seducing tender minds inside what never served us, the curious eyes of every proton bundled relative watching and wondering which tomorrow we will unleash on one another