Always We Begin Again
We shared two of Aaron Brown’s poems back in August. Always We Begin Again is a poem that speaks to the long game, to what happens after the damage and hurt is done. “Eventually the scar will be covered… by high grasses and flowering weeds,” he writes. There’s harrowing, hurting imagery, but at the core is a hopeful poem. Read it below, or click through to read it and its partner poem, Twig-Weaving, at EcoTheo Review.
Always We Begin Again
Today you could wake up and say, It doesn’t have to be complicated—
life, that is, in the way a forest overtakes the scourge of the machine.
Eventually, the scar will be covered first by high grasses and flowering
weeds, then shoulder high pines that spine their way to the leaf ceiling.
Life, you could say, could be like that. A regrowth, something
the whole forest seems to agree upon, beginning the moment after
the metal teeth carve a wound. Life could be like that, and love.
Love—the way years from now you will look down the path
the machine took and never know that once this was the way
the humans went, blistering their way, metal teeth dripping sap.
