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Bone Meals
Bones remain, retain, and nourish
the under-croft, the terrain,
the meadow green.
Bones replant. They are meals for
the mouths of ghosts.
The dead feed the living,
and the living cut down the alive
to feed themselves.
The world must eat itself.
This is called husbandry and farming.
It is also called shopping and carrying,
killing, and butchery.
Those that eat only vegetables
also partake;
for the leaf and stalk
are seeded in the mellowing marrow
of a long planted bone-sown mire.
Often bones are dropped into the soil
as if the dirt were an ocean
and the land all that is or was left-over.
This is known as litter.
A grave is a half-way house,
Urns are waiting rooms.
Worms wheel the bon-rich earth
towards the sky for its blessing.
Osseous is the ancestry that seeds nations.
What follows bone and bone ash
becomes the crop, the tomorrow-cart
laden with its bone harvest.
Bone-flowers scent the air
from the empty canals of nowhere.
Bones scaffold wingspans,
they riddle citadels of stone.
Bones in tombs and catacombs
are pabulum for the larder.
A storage for generations.
Copyright ©
Eric Ashford
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