The Earthen Dance

The footsteps turning round the mounds and rounds of silt and the powdery, fertile soil resound: Stomp! Plodding, marching in toil, and tough- ened skin, serrated bones, igneous blood- stained lesions in the depths of flesh, and sinew-hardened strength beat the brows above the eyes— brute force, hot sweat, and bestial plaintive blows. Corduroy, almost velvet: the Earth’s in measured rows from the plow, down-pressed and forth, with upturned brown as bitter iron scratches through the folded ground, marking out the furrowed sillion; creases burrow in the wrinkled flesh of ancient earthen skin with a hemorrhage. Each is the part the other lacks, each the berater, and the other’s better half.

Proficient hands have born a craft — oh noble mind! — but what the beast contained within this hide? What the heavy breaths that heave in moans and sighs as the sun assaults the dancers’ eyes, their heart- felt cries as answered by the quakes that move the plow, the trembles concealed within the troubled brow, and the plow that moves the quakes from side to side? What mystery, the sight thereof! A living sign! These dusty, ashen bodies pour out their treasured life over years, over dusty arduous years of heavy strife, that never ought the thrust of pain of want, nor the sting of hunger, seethe to tease or taunt the one who courts this constant earthen dance where man and Earth to each the other advance.

But no! The toil and strife extended in the field but yields a weak and often-shattered shield from questions without a tatter of reasoned hope for answers, resolve, when comes the arid drought. As human sweat waters thirsting crops and dries instead into a thin and salty splotch, no springs will gush to slake the burning thirst when the sun bears down to do its relentless worst. And what doubts arise from the noble mind whose hands lodge the precious seeds in the Earth, and sand appears bereft of water, and the serpent, coiled, conceits his head above the bullied soil? A crushed lament will echo through the arid land as sung by the desiccate Earth and the sullied Man!