The Bone Farm

In writing of cats,

Lessing remembered

One very dry year

Of rural childhood

In South Africa—

The veld was all bones.

The point of her tale

Of drought and then storms

Was about a cat,

Not about weather,

But what a sentence,

That. You’ve seen desert?

The grassier kind

That can sometimes seem

Lusher than forests?

When it’s dry, it’s bones,

All bones, the dirt’s bones,

The bones of Earth’s crust.

That’s when you know, life

On Earth is old, but

One day it could go.