Cabbages

My body drunk with sun;
Hard, baked clay beneath scorched flesh.
My bones sense the coming Sabbath,
By sunset, I tend to my cabbages,
Toiling in the waning dusk.
I dig in the earth and its secret musk.

Supper’s prayers whisper on my dry tongue,
Dry helpings for a day’s labor.
Since I was a boy, the same dry loaf, the solitude.
Father would come with night by candlelight,
Steps squelching on the wet mud floor,
His secret musk seeps six feet beneath…

My sleeping vessel oppressed by dreams,
A thatched roof threatened by winds,
A heavy silence sloshing in the earth’s belly,
I follow him, frozen in his stare.
His pale specter mouths with lips cracked and cruel,
“It’s a sin, sirrah, it’s a sin.”

I envy the world of worms and mites,
A world of earth and no remission,
Digging portals into darkness damp and fertile,
Leaving the Sabbath light sovereign on the surface,
Arid and dumb with vegetable sin,
Me nestled between singed leaves.

The day breaks in its morning light.,
Seen submerged, the surface is light,