Jane Brunton

It’s summer.
Dogs barking in closed cars.

It’s summer.
...

What’s he doing at the side of the road?
He’s sleeping In his matted tatted fur,
Weathered leather and crushed bone.
Sleep on squashed squirrel
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A bud! What joy! Fulfillment of life’s purpose.
The never ending circle of life and death and life.
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The world is a frigid waiting room of pebbled glass.
We make the chipping chopping sounds of an ice-storm morn.
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Overhead-passes spit contemptuously at passing cars.
Power lines emerge from dripping silver cocoons.
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The animals and birds seem to exist only in books now.
Or were they someone’s fantastic imaginings – the ravings of a mad man?
The rivers and woods are as silent as my book of colored pictures.
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Clouds at my feet; the condors back glistens in the misted light below. We glide, he and I, through the steaming cauldron, oblivious to the villages hidden below.

Far beneath me slides your disappearing majesty. Sad, solitary one; your mate’s the victim of Indian sacrifice. Your children are in zoos. Hated enemy of the poor, whose scrawny sheep you carry off. The enveloping mists obscure you like a shroud.
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The man ploughs his field and sows his abundant seed into the furrow’s depth

From this union of man and earth are born their edible children
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Spiky cacti sprout cloth flowers of purple, pink and orange wool. Bushes bear sequined, bell shaped, skirt flowers. It’s laundry day.

Home-bound sheep hurriedly crop their last bite of the polluted provender masquerading as wayside grass.
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The valley, green and flat as a pool table, stretches in the protective embrace of a jealous mountain. Like a ripe young woman she is too beautiful to last. Even the craggy arms of her mountain lover cannot stay the ravages of man.

He will slice through those arms and rape her flower-filled womb. From the rape will issue the children, Rock, Sand and Mud who betray her.
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Cocoon-like, she clings to the very tip of life. She clings through the gentle spring rain that swells her tender body till it bursts its crisp confine. Then she opens like a tiny green fist and blinks in the spring sunshine.

She gathers strength and toughness and when the autumn comes, unafraid, she turns her ruddy face into the wind, proud of her new clothes. Buffeted, she clings stubbornly to life, refusing to be torn away by the whim of the wind, but her strength is sapped as the tree draws into itself. Rain and hail and savage winds tatter her gaudy raiment but still she clings, hanging by a filament till one day her tenuous grip gives way.
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