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A Native Nativity

You try to make them civilized and grown-up,
but the words are infants,
they want to crawl around and yell for a bit.

You know that an eye is upon you.
watching you in that whelping room
where creation rearranges molecules
into a planetary system of speech
made of matchsticks and glue.

A poem is about to be splashed,
onto a speeding window of light.

Logic and reason must first
bash their bulbous heads together,
until their mechanical, self-winding brains
fall out.

The collective humming of incubators,
begins to lipread your silence.
A process similar to hand washing.

Eventually a swaddled indigenous form,
unwraps itself,
it begins to walk upright.

Matchsticks and glue
form readable fragments.

You begin to hope,
that someone inside that watching eye
will name what you have done -
even attempt,
to explain it to you.


Copyright © Eric Ashford

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Book: Shattered Sighs