Before the Voices

Before the Voices

It was a day when the pines
Wore the sun as sleeves
Around their many green arms,
When green herons were the eyes
Of the pines that glanced down
On red clay ditches beside clay roads
And their black rainbowed-back beetles,
A day when the purple of the thistle
Leaped out of a gully's yellow streaks.
It was a day when the wisest of pigs
Wallowing in shiny mud interrogated
Sycamores and found out their seed balls
were saints whose gold auras were inside
and never seen until the wind rubbed its
hands over their bodies
to turn the seed balls into golden birds.
The wisest of pigs learned that when
The seed balls of the sycamore rolled
It turned the earth into sacred ground.
This was the time when I was an isolated child,
And had heard only a few human words.


Duane Locke

Posted over on Eclectica