Truer Than True, A Poem For the Earth

Truer Than True
A Poem for the Earth
By
Joseph Anthony

Truer Than True

Roots are upside down trees
Spreading into vast, dark sky.
A sky thick with loam
That loves to give way to shovels and tillers,
A sky packed with clumps
Of cumulous clay,
A sky studded with the constellations
Of rocks and bone,
A sky woven with hidden rivers
And jubilant, Gordian worms,
A sky populated by sleeping cicada nymphs,
Burrowing rabbits, and moles
That tunnel blindly with dirt in their whiskers,
A sky punctuated with light-hearted seeds
And heavy, densely packed bulbs and tubers.
Yet, in the end, what is
This terra firma sky?
What is this rich, moist soil
That smells so heavenly?
What is it the roots grasp and let go of
Simultaneously?
Stories.
The earth, the soil, this stuff the rocks and bones,
Rivers and creatures all subsist in stories. It’s all stories
Building up over scrolls of millennia,
Libraries of centuries, composing,
Revisioning, edited by graves
And buried treasures, frackers,
And coal mines, wells and chasms
Of underground mountains yet to be born,
Only to dissolve again into
Infinitesimal grains, like
So many syllables dropped
From the whispered lips
Of bards, minstrels, and children,
And those who die face down
In the mud. Stories.
That’s what roots are surrounded by
And nibble on and assimilate.
And all of them truer than true.
Like flakes of mica, snowflake obsidian,
Fossils and caskets, tears and keys, arrowheads
And shards of pottery. True like rivers
That astonish us for finding ways
To flow underground and soak roots
With slathering kisses. True, like
Underground lakes surrounded
By rainbow-tinted cathedrals.
True like blood slowly seeping
Into cool, autumn leaves.
Stories are the soul of the earth,
The soul of sod and the ground of being,
Stories are the stuff of earth,
The very ground that lifts us through
Our every step and sorrow, our every
Joy and blunder, our every wandering
And seeking, our every discovery
And revelation. And they nourish
And compose us, form and speak us,
Sing and cry us, lament and celebrate us.
And each one of us, each and every
One of us, born from the soil,
Born from the ground,
This endlessly mothering earth,
Is a walking story, a living, breathing,
Story, stumbling, dancing, rising
And falling, and each one of us,
Each and every one,
Is truer than true.