Imagine That

By Stella Fenwick

Imagine that this small forest is the entire world

before religions grew.

Before the wild garlic created the rood, before

cave walls created false idols, before

the flirtations of two sparrows created apocryphal scripture.

Imagine that this stream, half the current

decaying duff,

is the mind before being told

the earth is something to be taken.

The white water, a bed cleanly made before Ophelia warms it,

empty before we learned despair,

clear before we learned obsession,

tensile before we learned tradition.

Imagine your knees kneeling on this dirt

are not kneeling in grazed-skin prostration, but kneeling

in admiration.

For the primordial and temporal,

for the proud trees before an afterlife was nailed to them,

before they created desks for you to crumple over

like this sun-bending climbing-fig.

Imagine that they are the first knees to ever touch this grain of ground.

Imagine the mud clinging to your white down tuft, taking the scruff

of it to work with you, then back to your silent bedroom

where nature has not trampled.

To gather in white duvet,

to start its own colony there,

where white is the world

created by an adolescent god, you.

To finally sleep on the brink before

all we have built has been built,

and to be content there.

— Stella Fenwick