The soul in the heart of stone knows only faint discomfort
content to mull over the implications of its crystallizing need
while continents as well as civilizations develop and contort
in the agony and ecstasy an agnostic divinity decreed
whose stone-carved script calls not for a lead role but support
and in whose contemplative soil sprouts hunger’s seed.

If impassive South won’t come to impulsive North, then North will sulk,
refusing food, an oddly repulsive hunger generated in his magnetic bulk.

Craving’s embryonic seed becomes a living thing apart,
takes root in the earth’s heart which has been languishing
for some satisfaction, some completion, some counterpart
to fill a growing void within that initiates new anguishing,
which knowing hunger teaches wordlessly plant life to well-chart
the circling sun’s position to preclude brief life’s extinguishing.

Now self-sufficient, the earth gleams merrily, glinting in the setting sun,
“Tiny plant, hide your pale face in my warm breast until the rising sun.”

Through new conduits of vitality, the plant soaks up the rains
and pulls from the earth’s breast the elements of its desires,
to which ingredients it adds what from the sun it gains,
spreading green leaves to capture daily and take in yellow fires,
is grateful to the wind which to flowering growth explains
where others of its kind are, and to green mansions it aspires.

But herb and flower and vine and tree are rooted in the ground
and wilt sickly if by their elemental lovers they are not found.