We are still here.
After the fires that burned. After the threshing machine choked with rust.
In our hunger we kept the elevators filled with grain.
Still the ground must remember crops
that plumbed its soil. Legs of wheat and barley
in the punctured earth, the roots that bore
through substrate into shale.
A coyote crosses the stubbled field and yawns and slinks away.
Soon somebody else will come
to plant a forest upside down,
bury the crowns and leave
the roots to tangle
parched, in sharper air.
Listen to this poem:
