Mustard Tree

Sadhu sits

still

on a flat rock made just for his bones,

breathes his belly out

and waits until he can hear the upseeping sap

in the legs of the forest.

'Make a eucharist for my children,' says the flat rock.

Sadhu jumps down like a boy,

breaks a loaf and scatters it.

'Both loaves.'

Sadhu smiles, breaks his last loaf.

I have no wine, he thinks.

'You are not looking,' says the flat rock.

He gathers blackberries,

squeezes them into a small smooth hollow.

Sadhu sits,

the afternoon eternal.

Sparrows, mice, ants come

pecking, nibbling, carrying away the crumbs,

wasps hover over the stickening juice.

As the sun's tap closes and the light pools,

deer loom not far off,

mosquitoes gather round their warmth,

bats and foxes stretch.

Dusk pangs move Sadhu on, and in his way

are pignuts, wild garlic, and the bitter leaves of elm

who also listened for the flat rock's voice.

The world's run out of wisdom,

building roads where no cities are

and praying for traffic and pastry sales,

accelerating the tow of stupid seeds in hot exhausts.

But the soul still travels overland,

over sand,

at the speed of a camel,

and when you're older

and the glassy-eyed twitching has stopped,

you'll regret the cutting of the baobab tree

that needed you

even less than you needed me.

Lumpen, silty stirring

around the tremulous half-buried flat fins,

elegant eddies of waste, waltzing.

No-one can see me down here

quilted by fine sand, camouflaged.

Think I might stay.

Haven't been a fish before, soft warm stomach-sleeping.

Now a filament of sand glides by

down and left,

in and out between green fronds

abrading, nibbling at flakes of skin

between yellowing toes.

Toes?

Watery dawn rays play on feet cold

from uncovering,

tingled by the sunlight

and sending a slow signal up the long drowsy tracks

towards the capital,

where feet have heeled shoes.

Does my foot know it's Monday?

I was happy as a fish.

When God's white eye lifts slowly in the east

and heats to vapour the swollen millrace of dreams

that call the priest

awake and up and into dazed attention,

and thankfulness arises in his heart

for light and warmth

and all the teeming stuff of earthy life

that comes with just a little tilling

and ancestral knowing of the place,

the woodpecker his alarm,

the timid deer his wife,

then he knows no better way to start

than touching forehead to the ground

and painting blessing

in every chamber of his heart

so that it leaks a bit with every beat

and blesses every tiny space

just like the worms beneath his feet.