the ground ate my crystal.

I fed the famished ground a crystal

under a tree that lives behind my home.

This is no allegory

Nor is this a metaphor

But a retelling, a narration

of how what lives

is beyond what we believe life to be.

These successions and crying out

Isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

So on that sweltering summer day

When the ground swallowed up

The Malachite I gave to a friend

And I dug and dug to find it again,

I heard a whisper from a cloud

Confessing that the soil was asking for me.

And in the many days I sat silently under this tree

Helped it form a kinship with me.

So when that very friend gifted me

that forgotten luminous green stone

thickened with speckles

the tree living in my backyard back home

lined with its vigorous soil, rejoiced.

And swallowed up that jade emblem, whole.