Bleeding Soil
Bleeding Soil
Yesterday
Mum went full baked-potato face again.
This time at me.
She asked me why I’d knocked
all the plants over in the living room.
Every single one of them was on the floor,
leaves broken, stems snapped.
Even the giant one with leaves that look like hands waving
that almost reach the ceiling.
Snapping those took some effort.
Io took a run up and rammed it with my wheels.
It looked like a hurricane had burgled our house.
They deserved it. I said it was payback.
I can’t push the tree over, but the tree will feel the pain
of all of these. It’ll feel what I did.
Mum started to cry.
I asked her if the spilled soil looked like my blood
when I lay on the ground after I fell.
© Stephen Lightbown from And I Climbed And I Climbed, illustrated by Shih-Yu Lin (Troika 2023)