The Patient Underling

Rise, tree of the nation
Borne from the admixture of silt and blood
Awaiting tributes like heroes’ graves,
Judgments of expectant machines expanding into branches
And cracking time’s reigns
Hastening its tear through the elemental night
Toward tomorrow,
And muttering one word in hopes of being heard
By the trunk.
 
The moonlight,
Having escaped the whole like lava from the earth,
Gleams upon its patchy portion of life,
Dispersed upon the naked boughs
In a layer of liquid sight.
So sad, the vacant vows
Birds’ nests disabused from larks who thought it home
Glistening, but unwelcome to the tongue
Frigid, but not white.

But ensconced like Moses’ gaze upon the bush,
Obscured from hungry heaven's jealous eyes
The taste of daytime lights upon two islands,
Now a continent.
A bomb that hates fire, its father, explodes
And knocks tongues dead
To terrorize the heart with delight.
Lungs free of warlike moss,
Both hands intact,
Stomachs ache only for more
But not anything;
The islands listen to the movements of their mantle
And break apart into silt after years,
Moments in the life of the land,
To feed the roots and chase machine judgments up the tree,
Which will try with all nobility
To anchor the earth when the last storm comes.

Chase an automated death;
When the reigns are noticed torn
— Distressed and threadbare for a nation’s flog —
Tie them,
So the tree can rise and raze the sky,
And feed the machines with self-regard,
Dosed to last one slumber
And lost in the lazy laughter of ten years hence.