The Mother

[DonSchaeffer]

The house of death
is almost never empty.
Life is too precious to waste it.
The deep skeleton of life
in its meaningless roundness
is never silent. Listen.
You will hear its gurgling and grinding,
its spliting and its joining.
The pieces will drift,
come apart and be found and grow.
The air
has been sucked in,
gurgeled, expelled,
mouth to mouth,
evacuated, bubbled.
Its our air
on this planet
in its place
uncontested.