Seizing Sunlight

Planet of mine,

I don’t know why we speak like you can hear us

and answer in our tongue–

we are the children of your dirt

who haven’t touched home in generations,

we, who exhale in billions of beats a minute,

have never embraced a single storm,

and we have lost what it means to hear you.

Planet of mine,

you never loved me,

even if I were to love you back

you would not repay;

treehuggers

get poison rashes,

you are a mother of harsh lessons,

blights and blizzards

teaching us to hide inside,

smoke and summers

telling us we are the destroyers

of our siblings,

you wear a thousand faces by night in hurricane and drought

we do this dance day in and day out

for survival and species and water and falling

but planet of mine,

I am alive

in your sky

and maybe I do destroy

in this deadly match

of eat or be eaten

but maybe I could learn

to be a savior in it too.