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.