Carbon, what’s left after water
vapor’s risen along with smoke,
the fire’s remainder a blackness
of orphaned atoms. Carbon, chains
wound up inside us, thirsts and murders
its side arrangements, braided fuse
igniting the present’s spark-light
in the black of was and will be. Carbon,
footprint of our fumbling, our cutting
down our origin’s columns
to stoke a stone hearth. And a diamond—
hard dry tear of still here,
a long-ago life pressed pure
in the dark under a forest, pick-axed
by a hard-worked dark-skinned miner—
you’ll wear it, held by a few silver
prongs to a silver wire to ring
your thin slow-burning finger.
A powerful poem. Thank you.