When Your Fingertips Met Grass

you pulled at the weeds as if they were choking

the lifeblood out of you, a nemesis personified,

but each time you tore at the grass brought hurt,

a recollection of times past in a long-gone memory.

*

you remember greater fields, tidy and clean-cut,

the rustle of a lawn mower pushing through,

until your senses sang with scents of summer

as birds chirped and insects flitted to and fro.

*

but then the storms ripped across grassy inclines,

the picture suffering from blows of rainfall

while winds stirred and tumbled and swirled,

until everything you knew became chaos churning.

*

it wasn't a matter of rebuilding or renewing—

those band-aids wouldn't hold for long enough—

yet you tried anyway, at least for a time, to reclaim

every little picture-perfect scene that was lost.

*

even the little plot of land, an inheritance of a kind,

did little to calm your nerves or ease your fears,

but there would be time for the sow and the reap,

because this landscape wouldn't suffer forever.

*

so you take to the grass every day, ever on cue,

till your back aches with the strain of it all—

and your fingers find the heartbeat of the soil

where there is new life, new hope, for a new era.