Leaf Sermon - Craig Erick Chaffin
I have been spiritually poisoned
by the unclean, in ignorance
blessed their springs.
In consequence I withered
and drifted down
from green crown to brown humus,
thinned to a fishbone pattern
of cellulose threads.
I washed into a stream
past stones squirming
with black question marks
of dragonfly larvae,
slid through reeds
into eddying pools
where I stalled until the rains
delivered me to the sea.
My last proteins fed the plankton
the humpback swallowed,
whose song woke me,
the ghost of a ghost of a leaf,
to the shocking green astral body
from which I speak:
You who seek
thrill without sustenance,
love without burden,
light without heat—
hollow, hollow men,
Tom ‘O Bedlam slim:
Your greatest feat
is to pull the sheet
from your own faces
each workaday morning
to avoid being wheeled,
to the refrigerated cases,
elbows locked in defeat.
