“every ecology depends on death”

cotyledons green to their task
of rising into trees, unruffled by captions

in a town in India a driver races
a bus-load of children through a gauntlet
of gunmen’s fire and seizes life

the heart can be a chalice
moss-velvet as the anther-d
pyramid of an eight-petal-d lotus

or a bloodletting shard
hewn off the planet with a saber
roar-voiced and petrifying;

it may take a long while to sand and
shore a spindrift, for thirsting terrain
to calypso with orchard wine

primeval is hope, oiled to a talent of stone
like this rain-sewn cloud charming
the old bakul  by the well into bloom

so, we heft the spade, primitively
till and garner
re-stoke the ailing stove.