The Pure and Bright Blood of Life

Earth, deep and moaning earth! I feel you there beneath my rough and trembling feet,

Crackling, electrical, thrumming, wild. Your unspoken words pooled up and running fast

Just below the surface, coming mad and boiling up from your bottomless chambers and pits,

Vibrating through the souls of my feet with words and themes unspeakably terrible and deep

Like the movements of a great symphony, shaking the hall with the bass of your tones,

Bursting the air with the high and brassy trumpets like lightning, grasping hold of my soul

Like the plucked strings of your softest notes. You are almost too much for me to bear

Upon the sun-bright and beautiful mornings when my steps upon the surface of the grass are

Warmed by the soil and such sensations take hold of me, as if the vast and pleasant currents of all the planets

Were conducting through my veins and up and into my bones and flesh. I am connected and in concert with you

These mornings upon the living, breathing, pulsed plain of your neck, one of the many, one of the kindreds

Of all the living, one of the breathing, blood pumping animals, frisking in the crisp and beautiful air.

The morning song of the doves is more pleasant to me than the richest choral arias and more sacred;

The wind that shakes the trees and makes them to dance for me commands the same reverence.

My soul is as light as these leaves of the trees and feels this stirring of the unseen hand no less.

The taste of the red and ripening fruits and the long, deep drinks from your cold springs;

These things are as holy sacraments unto me, these things are the pure and bright blood of life.

To stand in the deep and bosomy night beneath the numberless fields of the pulsing stars

Humbles me more than any religion and almost I cannot keep from bowing my head,

But why should I not look up with full and innocent eyes of wonder? I, who am a child and sibling

Of all things springing and pushing up from beneath the earth and all things racing and plodding or soaring above.

Do we not all have within us, expanding, this root of life, driving deeply into the dark and rocky bones?

And do we not, all of us, have ownership of this ground from which we’ve sprung, just as surely as it has ownership of us?

Having come from the very particles of it and passing back, in time, the gift, back into the ground,

Back into the red and rusted ground, back into the swelling, vibrant womb of all the earth.

I claim citizenship, I claim birthright, I claim sanctuary, my mother, for I am your son;

A son of the white and wintry waste, a son of the young and thrusting mountains, of thick shadows beneath the trees.

I am a son of the salt and the seas, of the pale and endless stars; a son of the earth, a citizen, a child.

Eric M. Petit