Children of the Earth are born from chaos, not hope,

For that is what creation has always been.

Disruptive, disorderly, disorienting, until it grows 

Into something only a mother can glean. 

 

Chaos is where it all starts, 

The making of you, a blissfully unaware child,

Aglow in the warmth of the sun and the stars. 

Play. Pause. Rewind.

 

Play 

In the crib with a pacifier;

In the backyard with your friends on somber summer days; 

In perpetuity, until your flickering curiosity kindles a fire. 

 

Pause 

For a moment, when your mother’s eyes linger on you as you prattle;

For a minute, when you fall from your bicycle, until you’re mended and gauzed;

Just a little longer, before you lose your youth to ad nauseam battles.

 

Rewind all of history.

Children of the opulent, children of the indigent;

Children in pillaged villages, caught in crossfire, their nonage under siege; 

Children who grew up, children who didn’t. 

 

Rewind the lessons we never learned, 

Enshrined in ink, grime, and gore, 

Passed down in letters from mothers to children, 

Nestled deep, like buried treasures, in the earth’s core.

 

Like nectar oozing from a punctured peach, 

Blood born from chaos drips down in dollops

Down mankind’s cupped hands, persistent, encroaching, treacly, 

Until it all, a little too late, decides to stop.

 

Decides to stop?

As if carnage has ever known a limit, 

Least of all when children are involved. 

It claws, it clutches, it constricts. 

 

I wonder if there’s sin in procreation. 

I ask you as I grieve the blanket of dust that cocoons my books I’d never pass on, 

I ask you as I grieve the creases in my palms, weighed down by inherited passions, 

I ask you as I grieve a face I’d never learn to grow fond of. 

 

I grieve what I can never lose.

I grieve you.