Green Burial Unsonnet
by Dante Di Stefano
In the milliseconds & minutes &
millennia when I no longer am the
bundle of meat & need unpoeming itself
in the still hours of a full or empty
house, I dream my eye socket encased
underground with root & worm &
watershed threading through it. | | The
summers become hotter & hotter. | |
Unbearable & luminous, the refrain of
the song of extinction—
My children & my children’s children
will inherit the edges of cumulonimbus
clouds, the unexpected sunflower
blooming from a second-story rain
gutter, the gentleness of the marbling
sunlight on the fur of a rabbit stilled in
a suburban backyard. | | I am in love
with the Earth. | | There are still
blackberries enough to light the brain
with the star charts of a sweetness—
& yet & yet & yet, the undertow of the
expanding universe repeats to the
mitochondria in my cells. The tiny
bluebird in my throat continues to build
her nest with twigs & mud & scraps of
Amazon packing tape. | | I feel the now
of now fluttering diastole & systole in
my biceps & lungs & toe bones | | The
oranges & reds & yellows of my many
Octobers leaf to life & spill from my
mouth: unaccountable acorns, midnight
loam, overgrown meadows,
a wee spore adrift among the fireflies—
About this Poem
“I would like to have a green burial someday. My wife and I often worry about the world our six-year-old daughter and two-year-old son will inherit and wonder what else we can do to preserve the Earth in all its beauty. This textbox prose poem ‘unsonnet’ challenges the tradition of the sonnet (and lineated poetry) even as it enacts some of the form’s structural and lyrical mechanisms. This formal tension also calls to mind the tension between inherited social norms (our dependence on fossil fuels and factory farming, for example), and efforts to move into a more sustainable, greener future.”
—Dante Di Stefano
https://poets.org/poem/green-burial-unsonnet?mc_cid=4e9acd195e
