Crimson, blood red, deep as the birth labors of our mothers, trillions throughout time, a swarm of human creel, tiny and minute against the vast ink oceans of universe, every great thrust of change, a whale swallowing us all.
My fingers, pale and dripping with the depth of cherry-tart sweetness, slice tensile skin and rip the heart of the pit from the soft fruit. One bowl. A second. Halved and pitted, I am freezing cherries for later months, long past the orchards’ bearing.
Overhead, the bruised thunderheads collide. In sweeps of shadow and light, our space-traveling sun rushes across the desert. The wind tiptoes, cautious in her mischief, barely ruffling the dry grasses.
Ancient time and the expanse of the earth stand at my shoulders like sisters as I pit cherries. It’s a day like any other, but today the veil is lifted, the mundane living room curtain we humans throw over the window to the mythic, desperate as nervous housewives to keep up appearances, make-pretending normality while beneath our aprons and fixed smiles, the gaping maw of creation roars and the whale’s mouth of the epoch swallows us whole, along with our mothers, our histories, and our blood-red cherry lives.
Author/Activist Rivera Sun is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and other books, the cohost of Love (and Revolution) Radio, and a trainer in strategy for nonviolent movements. www.riverasun.com