Haibun after the Industrial Revolution

COHORT 4

Mother Nature distilled our wishes into dandelion wisps. Back then, the earth laughed in flowers & Mother’s laugh honeyed the fields she kissed. Every day she wove light into cocoons, her nimble fingers spinning a lifeline from heaven. From them, her love emerged: lilied in a garden’s tender shoots. One by one, the north wind plucked their roots, & Mother came to know love as the vault where she would lock her heart away. Eventually, we metastasized from the mud of her breast. The fossils document our destruction, our shovels raised to plunder her soiled flesh. In the ancient scrolls passed from one daughter to the next, Mother cried until the water dyed itself blue. Until creation myths stained her palms. Mother twisted their mulch with a single strand of hair, made our mouths so that we could gobble sorrows away like bread. Like days, they faded

into hunger, sharp

teeth sinking beneath fruited

plains of massacre.

Here is the omitted history: before the birth of our copper-coined beast she wept a sky of tears & baptized it ocean. In their depths, schools of fish rippled beneath the waves, their symphony sprawled along Mother’s childhood shore. At night, she rinsed the reefs in moonlight. Her lucent breath tickled the tide—tender, the way a mother cares for her young. This, we surmised, could have been us. But we were raised in a life barren of her touch. In our soot-streaked societies, we watched waterfalls of dead leaves fan flames for ravaged forests. We fed ourselves to nozzles of gasoline abed asphalt floors. Our mouths—eating more smog than sorrow. At dusk, when the crickets & cicadas curled into their wooden coffins, we strained our ears against the static. Searched for any murmur of her voice. Any lullaby to ward off the manufactured pulse of murder. To distract ourselves from the grating sound of white noise, we sold ourselves to steel. Sealed entire childhoods in the growl of exhaust. Glimpse the inevitable: Fuel, the next frontier printed on every poster within reaching distance. A history forgotten in the length of this prayer:

O holy oil—

bless this invisible hand

thieving our sky.

Once, Mother painted us the brass-blustering sun, the fluted moon & we left her shrine in cinders silenced to smoke. We didn’t know any better. We sang anthems of progress, curved railroads with our brash fists. We willingly paid the price for progress. We called this sacrifice filial piety; after all, how else were children supposed to show devotion toward their mother, if not by moving the needle of her creation forward? So we followed our devotion through a newborn fawn flayed on her breast, fisted in guttural strips of meat. We signed Mother’s virginity away on the dotted line. Now, Mother sighs her days away at the edge of our concrete jungle. Awaiting the end, Mother trades her empire for a pyre, her pleas for this poem: 

In the dandelions,

I will wait for you. I am

sorry, so sorry.