Do you ever stop –
have you ever stopped –
to realise
(perhaps between the watch credits button
and the words ‘next episode’)
that everything our houses
are built of came out of
the earth, somewhere?
The bricks are mud
(okay, we knew that one)
and the mortar between them
is sand from the beach
and the wooden mouldings,
the doorframes, the skirting boards,
used to stretch their
roots through the soil?
Until we cut them off.
And the plasterboard once was
a rockface, with the air on its cheek
or perhaps, the weight of a thousand
of its cousins above it.
The metal in your chest of drawers,
your office chair, your
clothes hangers, came from little
streaks in giant stones,
crunchy bits of rock that
went through hell and back to
get here, to hang with you,
to hold things up.
How much earth embraces one person,
and this is not a climate catastrophe poem,
this is not a guilt trip,
this is just a note to notice it,
to see it, so much earth
holding up your two feet,
your head when it’s sleeping,
earth in the shape of your favourite seat.
Could this be teamwork?
Could we both, all of us, be growing?