Image: ArtTower/Pixabay (CC0).

Buried Days

I have a memory, in daylight and in sleep. We leap easily over streams, make love in arboreal dreams. A big-toothed cat pursues our scent through blossoms blowing groundward from the rain-drenched trees.

The Earth’s got a memory of the days of untamed figs. Before we speared, harnessed, bred things, before everything known was named. That was when the coyotes’ sweet wails flowed into the sky from the distant volcano that’s now billed as a bitcoin dynamo.

Who will be freed? Nations? People?

In our own microcosmic struggle we can’t escape our cravings. Self-domestication once done can’t be undone. Cut the low pine boughs, and they never grow back.

Off we run. Where’s the alpha of the pack? But that’s just a hangup, a fantasy. So we scatter, clash and crash like insects flying to a lamp, thinking it’s the moon.

Sheeple! A term of disparagement for diving headlong into lies, for being herded by the throat cutters. Sheeple!

Sheep did not follow us; they led their own. Generation by generation, they learned to cross the mountains and the seasons, to follow the rivers, and the green shoots.

A river’s got a memory. Like the seasons. Like the sheep.

I have a memory, in daylight and in sleep.