Do trees cry when you chop them?
Do trees cry when you cut them down?
Do they feel the pain when the axe falls?
Do they bleed when you put a blade through their bark?
I wonder what happens to their roots?
I wonder how they feel when uprooted?
Do they weep when they are gutted?
Are their screams and cries for help lost in the burning pain
when fires light up their unheard screams
Like an unseen bloodstain
by YASSY
© All rights reserved 2024
I who have known pain: You say, not this pain —
Your pain runs wider and deeper than mine.
Your pain thoroughly over-canyons mine
out-oceans mine, thrusting a fiery head
up from the mountaining deeps, your pain heaps
a new island stone by stone, bare and black,
licked by flame — your pain and mine are not the same —
to which I offer a palm and say: look.
That open sky swallows our smaller lives,
spits them out in some mightier place — or shits
them, it’s good to be humble. Look: a bird
leaf-beaked alights upon that lonely shore.
Not my bird or your bird, but its own bird,
other-bird, leading the way to fresh cliffs.
A bird brings seeds, drops seeds, shits seeds, a bird
drawn there to the heaped ruin you call yourself.
You cannot know this bird, you have always known
this bird, this holy spirit, white as the salt
in your tears. This bird nests in your pain, builds
paradise. Hope floats its coconut in,
unbidden, under that embracing sky.
by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2024
We return to the beginning, stripped
of our knowledge and rank, bound in white:
a shroud, a swaddling blanket, a bride’s veil,
a drawer stuffed full of rags and bandages.
Trussed up in white and left naked by fear.
The brutal say I don’t learn anything —
that’s why I no longer seek the brutal
as teachers, their blood my blood, their hiss
and spit so familial. Let gentleness
teach me these most difficult lessons
that I must begin again, without rank
or honor to learn a gentle way.
Or perhaps it is the easiest
of tasks: drop your knowledge, begin again
a blank page awaiting a love song —
by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2024
I took lessons of humility
from the worn roadside stones.
Nothing can teach civility
so well as the shattered bones.
That’s why my posture is queenly
and my manners are aesthetic.
Your sense of beauty knows so keenly
when reality is prosthetic.
by TETIANA ALEKSINA
© All rights reserved 2015
unbolt me 