Mother Earth in Desperation

A poem and and art piece by the gorgeous and wonderful Anthea
our mother has been
sucked dry,
her blood cracks on our
lips, our snake-like
tongue languidly licking
canines
sinking
into passionfruit, we eat
her.
Crude.
We drink her up, gurgle
and spit.
Rude.
we stomp forward down
her hills, stab her with drills,
She whimpers, clenching
in silence, then teeth scrape
with anger,
biting nails,
back of her throat fighting against vocal cords,
her green limbs shake and thrust up to the sky.
pressed down, she winces
and
contracts in pain as we
keep digging into her breast
for her milk.
scratching through her
pubic forest for wood to
burn
to turn to green paper,
we venerate no longer,
our mother
but that
through voices of birds
and forces of winds,
she screeches
for help,
shackled mouth yelps
drowning in petroleum
tree trunks ashes in fire
yet incessantly,
she screams
squirming
struggling to breathe
under our technological
ropes.
like parasites we destroy
our own source,
bite our womb and
bend down for the new
diety,
perfect, rectangular, crisp
It shape shifts like her:
instead of from winds,
to trees, to chirps, to
waves,
it’s from fives, to tens, to
fifties, to thousand.
With these numbers
crumpled up in our grasp,
we walk home,
claws sinking into the
soft,
concave belly of the
mother.
“Are you proud of us?” we
ask her.
And the
Ground trembles,
crumbles,
skies start to cry, in reply
and we wryly
wonder why.
Not a single whisper
guessing it’s the pain
we inflict as we cut that umbilical cord
between us
and our green mother,
for that piece of paper.
Eventually, she will flail
her arms back, giving up,
rolling into herself like a
baby,
as her own
hand-woven creations cut
her stitches
fry her moss, mountain,
fresh-water meat.
She will sit silent,
waiting for death.
Her kingdom is falling. And we’re hungry wolves.
watching
breathing heavily.