After we have divided and divided
bounty after bounty, disassembled beauty,
cast aside notions of spirit,
disregarded feeling and faith in favor of
entropy, watched the planets and stars
fall away from the house of meaning—
gathering our precious material belongings,
hoping to retain this life without scruples,
into the dark we’ll ride—encumbered wagons down
jagged roads through self-fulfilled apocalypse,
karma-heavy, battered by rain and
lightning, wind and water rising. Still, we
mount our failed convictions like an unwilling lover,
nurse like infants on the sour milk of ego,
orphans to the cosmos—ragged children
pretending to be lawyers and clergymen,
quaking with unwavering dogma, ignorance our
religion, canonized into rituals of cannibalism, bellies
swollen with everything we’ve swallowed:
trees, tribes, truth and tenderness. Atrocities
unfurling from our fingertips generate the
vortex of our own doom. What then—
when the last gasp of our
xenophobic fear escapes through cracked lips into
yawning eternity? Will the green return?
Zinnias, azaleas, acacia trees—a garden to obscure our sins.
.
Al Fournier
Painting: Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch
.