ONE MORNING DURING THE PANDEMIC

A Poem for Earth Day, 2020

BOBBY BYRD

 

Revolutionary consciousness is to be found

Among the most ruthlessly exploited classes:

Animals, trees, water, air, grasses

—GARY SNYDER

One morning during the pandemic

springtime

the city silent with the fear of death

a hedgehog cactus from among its dangerous spines

gave birth to a single luscious pink and white blossom,

the size of a man’s fist,

its sexual core bright yellow and gooey—

“the promised one,”

as stated in the prophecies.

The blossom, once born in the sunshine, began to preach the gospel of the earth,

     its dance through the wide blue sky,

the sermon explaining

exactly

how and why humanity is not needed,

if it ever was, thank you,

for the earth, sun, moon and sky,

the great boundless universe,

to flourish

in the truth of love.

All day long the flower preached,

interrupted from time to time

by a pair of black-chinned hummingbirds,

seasonal migrants from south to north,

who kept coming by

greedy for communion, the body and blood,

take this and eat, take this and drink.

There was that one black bumblebee too,

squat little beast,

ravaging the delicate core of the flower’s being.

The flower continued its sermonizing

unperturbed

while attending to these duties.

Neighbors and friends,

walking up and down the street,

stopped by to experience firsthand

the flower’s message.

What they learned, only time will tell.

We’ll see, won’t we?

The flower preached until sunset

and during twilight it slowly

closed those delicate petals into itself,

packed its bag and disappeared

     forever. The cactus

     didn’t seem to mind. It had small buds

already perched among its spines,

each with its own truth to tell

—in its own time, of course,

the long hot summer, the winter to come.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22, 2020

BOBBY BYRD grew up in Memphis during the golden age of the city’s music scene. “That music,” he says, “probably saved my life.” Byrd has published ten books of poems, his most recent being Otherwise My Life Is Ordinary. He has received an NEA Fellowship for Poetry; the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship; an International Fellowship in Mexico funded jointly by the NEA and Belles Artes de México; and, with his wife, novelist and editor Lee Merrill Byrd, a Lannan Fellowship for Cultural Freedom. Byrd, Lee, and their three kids moved in 1978 to El Paso. In 1985, they founded Cinco Puntos Press, a very independent publishing company rooted in the US/Mexican Border. Byrd (his Buddhist name is “Kankin,” meaning sutra reader) is the Abbott and lead teacher at El Paso’s Both Sides No Sides Zen Center.