more benevolent?

these were getting kinda glum.

--

Poem Towards Four Words for Earth

I sat on your porch today and taught you the word for earth
in four languages.
I picked them up piecemeal
talking to friends who write in foreign alphabets
all night. Zemlya
is my favorite – it sounds
black as the Russian steppe that steams
pungent and deep with snowmelt, Gaia
gutted with tremors.
We rocked back
against the warming wood,
stammering
again,
the flowers your mother spent so many hours on
recover enough to strain to the light,
and while their tender, pulpy heads
fall open, while the dinner herbs
describe good smells on the breeze,
we are writing the same characters over
and over in the dust that gathers on wood arms
and wicker bodies of sunchairs
while wicked hungers sudden
and unsaid as the deaths of strangers pass
murmuring through our chests.