Crop Cults

Recycling, grocery virtue, hopeless votes:
these rituals are how we'd save the world—
not sex in wormy furrows
to fertilize some oats,

not crucifying scarecrow hotties, once
they've mated with the May Queen. We contend
our lives are more than leaves
or lentils. That sweet dunce,

the body, understanding none of this,
still aches to blossom with the blossoming
of everything that dies.
It never heard the lies

our egos eat. It doesn't care for truth.
My body thinks of yours the way a tongue
continually roves
half of a broken tooth

it must soon lose. And it already knows
the sharp gap that the dentistry will leave.
Despite a winter of Platonic oaths,

you kissed me at the vernal equinox
and that was great but the coincidence
can't handcuff us to the grandfather clocks

of history and biology. Around
the funeral of the Loaf-King
at Lammastide, I'm bound

away to study supernatural
mechanics, make up spells too weird to die.

And so are you. No gods of husk and hull
can gobble down what we've already learned

or all the ways our tongues and fingers burned.

Copyright © 2006 Elizabeth Hadaway All rights reserved
from Fire Baton
University of Arkansas Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission