Seed
It’s a shell, a foregone conclusion
waiting its chance to be shattered, perhaps,
by something as graceless as luck.
It lands softly and with little fanfare,
a goddess with her apple inside.
Fecund, maybe. Encircled by pulp.
The sculptor’s made one of marble,
bright and sensual; it glistens. It cracks
in changing weather, and is no longer itself
but rather something else: broken apart.
The light loves it. Moths shroud it at nighttime.
What does it take to move this slow heart, this stony larva?
The day unfolds, and the sun, and the change of seasons,
today’s traffic passes and is gone forever.
Still, an urge for outside intervention,
for anything, anyone better than this
cramped and brittle potential, and though
the nights come and the sculptor sighs
and lays down her tools, it rests too, but uneasy
on a bench: the blind compulsion of everything
that strains, again and again, to be born.
