sholanda

to amanda, who bears her red fruit:

perennially,
the same tree that bore the year before,
growing where it rooted,
seeding where it fruited.

these are harvest words to be composted,
to turn our herstory into garden gold.
this long legacy of fertile letters grow uncontained,
rambling until something stops them,
putting out the egg-pod of autumn
and waiting for it to invisibly split
and drip spores like liquid diamonds.

what it is i see
is the dwarf pomegranate tree;
the blood egg basket of our womynhood.
the essential flora that softens the briar,
cradles every fallen fruit with soft mother arms--
watch as they sway and blow like dancing.

the life wheel that serves to keep us in time
with one another's cycles is illuminating our
blood and bodies,
our babies and birthdays.
we have been everything together.
we are rotten and rich.
together, our sex is buried under the fern canopy,
and from it new fern-life will be growing constantly;
my skin as i shed it annually,
my opal as it waxes instinctually.

and here is the core of what birthed this poem, amanda.
the old apple image
of perfect, sustainable fruit
shining my image of you in the
red, intimate epicycling
of the apple giving back to the earth.
our bodies that once tumbled together so passionately
are growing into hibiscus trees
and the roots are extending
to touch and find the earth's ends.
we sleep under the same water sky, the moon's phases;
it sews our refinement to the flesh of our fruit,
our flower, our seed.