Apples to Oranges

They cut the grove -
My garden of Gethsemane
where I planted my apple trees,
And watched them grow.

I can still see them reaching out
From severed stumps;
They strain then slump.
Like hands - their trunks, fingers – their sprouts.

I watched them die,
Wither like flowers and decay;
Bursting in the heat of the day -
the apples of my eye.

An eye for an eye
Leaves the whole world blind
and so I was told,
To grow oranges next time.

Erosion Poem (Take Two)

They spoke of a split near the end of a road
With two distinct paths to where no men dare go:
There’s one bathed in shadows while the other drinks light
One cursed by the sun while the other by night.

They say one holds nothing while the other holds all
One road to the void and one road to the sprawl.
They say one is blinding, but the other one blinds -
These roads I desired and swore I must find.

I encountered a stone when my quest first began
Worn smooth by the ages in an unchanging land –
Where the sun scorched the earth with its infinite faces,
And the moon stood alone over those cold desert places.

With the sand long behind me I came to a dale
Cut deep from an ancient and mountainous veil
By men I first thought, but I soon saw the truth:
‘Twas carved by the rivers of the Fountain of Youth.

And I found that these rivers led to a shore
Where once there was life but now lives no more
For the land had long fallen away to the sea
And the sea was left barren by unforgiving debris.

I thought of the stone that was once jagged now smoothed
And I thought of the valley whose life had been soothed
By the rivers that fed into a dead sea
And thought how complex the simple could be.

But at long last I came to stand at the path,
That diverged and became the first and the last,
They’re said to be opposites, but differed in none -
The division: eroded, and two roads became one.

it's still rough, but i may decide not to edit it simply because editing shit usually goes downhill for me.