Mother Earth
by Rachael Ikins
She is a big soft woman
a curled fetal ball.
They swarm her like ants.
Assault her; bombs, pile drivers,
endless marching foot steps.
Strew her skin with trash.
Piles of nothing alive.
Gray dust cakes nostrils,
A trickle of blood
stripes her chin.
A big anonymous woman
forgotten by the entitled masses
who wrangle and tromp
all her secret places.
Digging, gouging, drilling
pipelines to suck her blood.
Sometimes she wakes from
the nightmares she wanders:
Rolls her arm-earthquake shatters a city.
Blinks a tsunami-washes away thousands.
Her heart beats-volcano blows,
slashes of lava pulse away civilizations..
She melts ice caps, raises waters, pulls her land back.
Her fury, her voice the sound of hurricanes shrieking.
Some say she is off her axis.
Some say she is crazy.
Crazy with grief, ancient heart aches for humans who steal
life from countless beloveds; her centipedes, honey bees, her elephants, rare orchids,
sightless worms that linger by hot springs in ocean depths.
With immune responses evolved when she was nothing but
a star’s dream, she urges them to genocide and war, anything to rid
the human plague that consumes her body until nothing will remains but
bones of stone that flash past the sun.
(They can never plunder
the sun, though they plot
to send tourists to the moon
and other far cold places.)
She curls up again, exhaustion takes her.
She sleeps again, prays for no dreams,
too soft to face their sharp
edges any more
for today.
Mother Earth was inspired by a painting a friend gifted me. I met the actual artist at a gallery event years later. Global warming and human impact on the planet are a constant ache in the back of my mind.
Mother Earth was previously published in Fly on the Wall Press’s summer 2019 anthology Planet in Peril.
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