From mud, and by blood. Of cinders and bone.
Written by Liz Michaud
The first form I ever took was air.
I was not quite a thing,
I was the idea of a thing.
Nebulous in my obscurity.
Perfect in my imprecision.
Affable to every flit of the breeze.
As light as a whim,
And as vast as a dream.
But curiosity breeds conception,
So, snap! I crystalized.
And shattered to life as sand.
Oh, but even as dirt I was perfect.
There was so much room to grow.
The first time I was water,
I collapsed into a puddle.
Gasp! Splash! Sob! Sploosh!
I left eddies in my wake.
I stretched, I soaked, I became mud.
I sprouted, I groped, and I clung.
My roots sank deep, and my limbs stretched wide.
Tendrils found friends,
I gripped them too tight.
And on and on and on it went,
In sprawling fields and riverbends.
We touched the sky, hand clasped in hand.
And then the floods began.
The rains came down in hellish fells,
Tides creeping in unending swells.
My lungs wheeze out like drowning bellows.
And somehow, I sink.
Even though I am hollow.
In the deep dark I was nothing.
And no thing is the worst thing
That I have ever not been.
But I wasn’t nothing, was I?
Down there in the dark.
A spark!
The first time I became fire,
I burned myself right up.
Snap! A flick of a match.
Sulphuric furor. Magmatic blast.
With embers in my blood,
Everything changed.
All my crops were tainted,
Too mercurial,
Strange.
I was a jagged piece of flint,
Striking without aim.
I did not like the fire’s sting,
The way it swallows everything,
Until all I want is nothing.
Like it is the best thing,
I could be.
So every time I burst in pain,
My lungs plume up in searing flames,
And I am smoke again.
Oh no, not perfect air again,
Always a little grey.
This time I do not shatter to earth.
I crumble to ash.
This time, I beg for the flood.
If I can’t have my friends, at least give me mud.
It is hard to grow a garden,
When the soil is so poisoned,
But somehow roots take hold.
And the burn, you know, is worth it,
Now that the rains can be controlled.
