We Must Make a Kingdom of It Poem by Gregory Orr

So that a colony will breed here,
love rubs together two words:
"I" and "she." How the long bone
of the personal pronoun
warms its cold length against her fur.

*

She plants the word "desire"
that makes the very air
amorous, that causes the light,
from its tall stalk, to bend down
until it almost kisses the ground.

*

It was green, I saw it -tendril
flickering from dry soil
like a grass snake's tongue;
call it "flame"—light
become life, what the word
wants, what the earth
in its turning
yearns for: to writhe and rise up,
even to fly briefly
like the shovelful over
the gravedigger's shoulder.