Gravity

Published in part by We'Moon 2022:

   Doesn’t everyone have some place somewhere that they are so sure remembers them? But now not even a bird could recognize it from the sky. And sometimes I wake up scared, to know I was born into a world like a giant mechanical body, a world made of truck and plastic and supermarket, and no matter how much I think I love, every time I do anything, I accidentally knock down forests with my giant mechanical hands.
    But I go to sleep among Fireflies. And the Earthworm tells me how deep within where we cannot see, he is she and she is he, and they are integrating it all, reweaving the groundwork for life. Young monarchs with stained-glass wings tell how it took generations before they even looked beyond the next flower—how their early spring and summer ancestors could not imagine the new worlds they fly toward now, so who knows? Vultures tell how they seek death out: that’s where the nourishment is. Cicadas must drink from the roots of history for a long time, before they can rise and sing. Deer tell how to lay their antlers down and give it up, trusting that new ones will grow back stronger next year. Hermit crabs are willing to walk naked on the beach, from the old shell to the new.
    Cardinals never fly away south, no matter how cold it gets, but call up the sun with their red songs each morning. Bears make the spring come by surrendering to the darkness of winter; desire wakes the groundhogs in spring. Salmon, moving impossibly uphill against the flow of time, tell me that really, they’re only returning home. And Canada Geese tell how spring is nothing more than circling back to the wholeness we once knew.
    I dream the earth holds me tight—they call it gravity; I call it love. The river is going down, down to the center. It is always going there. Whales were once land creatures, but they returned to the sea.
    And I’m not afraid.

© Mindi Meltz 2019