The middens
Here they will have sat and opened
the fruit of the sea – fruit being a land word,
sweet and salt – the middens
growing about them, their young
and the young of their young, shells
once manufactured in the hearts
of molluscs, chucked.
So many places they’ve made unloved
but with a beauty to the power of usefulness,
making now their own shells – shell
being a word with both pearls and emptiness –
with machines they’ve made in the minds of
other machines that somewhere
are programmed by hand.
They outstrip in hunger the rest of earth,
that jealous top soil teeming with rivals
covering concrete in the night,
lifting tarmac on the shoulders of saplings.
Their roundabouts spin riders
encased in vehicles off on all routes
but where we come from.