Cities of Dirt

published in Soils Turn, 2025.

little beings

Living souls

thousands, seething

on the smallest crumb of Dirt

They

Changed our atmosphere

2.5 billion years ago

the collective Breath

of a legion of tiny cells

Changed our history

Underground

lives our past

our future lies in wait

what will the tiny denizens

of an ancient, endless kingdom

bestow upon us next?

another Healing shroud?

rich in oxygen and pregnant

with possibility?

or a noxious poison

to exterminate all those endowed

with multiple cells

who have so desecrated

what was built for us…

suspended

in a matrix of Earth

of rotting leaves

and shells

minerals

elements

precious stones

and Earthly jewels

dwarfed by giant annelids

and rollicking isopods

nettled

in a riot

of roots

consuming

converting

sleeping

aspiring to nothing grander

than to live and grow

Unchanging

for billions of years

yet constantly

Exchanging

the currency of genes

Hope

new lifestyles assumed

each niche filled

one for all and all for us

might we take note,

learn to adapt so freely,

to let go and move on

to Begin again.

…our Collective womb

cradle of regeneration and rebirth

so as the Soil and its teeming masses

of single-celled stewards

have given us life,

so They may take it away

we should be cowed by their power

Their offerings to the air

our bodies

to Gaia

may we all         one day                                  repay

Their gifts with our Carbon

our compounds

our Breath

Innumerably divided

among the cells of our microbial brethren

Timeless keepers of the Soil

perpetuating our Planetary story

our deaths no death at all

but the birth of billions upon billions                                                                                                                                                                         of new lives