The Loss of a World

Visiting an oil palm plantation: a poem

Spilled oil palm berries. // Credit: M. Cole Grady

A ground that bears the loss of a world
stories layered in loam, depressed beneath each step.
Millenia of bones, of lives and of life
of leaves, of stories and crystal elixir.

A channel of murky water wears the world away
away the vitality, away the journeys and epics,
hillsides and a sacked tree’s wisdom.

We are ants, and
we rule the Earth.

A vine grew once atop a rock
where a cluster of blood fruit now sits.
A person of the jungle gazed at the stars,
through a break in the celestial canopy.

Now, people of the world
of coffee and sugar and sickles and sticks
refuse the constellations.

From behind an oil palm, jungles braced for their end. // Credit: M. Cole Grady

We cannot know their stories,
we will not listen.
To a rational mind, the material is not so
nor is the ground beneath
nor the movement of air