Spiritualizing the Organic

The garden heaves with what does not belong—
plastics, agent orange, rubber cement, land mines
that won’t biodegrade, disintegrating corpse
bones, sanded into earth by worms 
whose progeny will someday dismember us, too.
We chant things that grow, generate 
heat, reproduce, breathe, eat, drink. 
We have tasted the sun freckling our skin, 
watched cows’ flesh darken in the iron pan,
felt the poppy seed reconfigure the brain. 
We weep, embarrassed, changed 
by slaves’ sweat, Jews’ ashes, embryos’ blood,
the inhumanity of humans, 
the irony that dead flesh sings the spirit’s psalm. 

We question: Are we circumscribed 
by ethereal sky? Or are we mud? 
If we ask the rose, the raw ornament says: 
“I grace your tables, scent your clothes, 
spawn love in romantics, 
then decorate your caskets and graves.”