Datura wrightii
Sacred datura
James H. Blanford
You unfold the extravagance
Of your purple-fringed white flowers
While one curious creature watches.
Our spiritual yet toxic essence
Suffuses all your parts
From the thick tap-root that
Anchors you against the autumn rains and floods
To your erect, spiky top-knot filled with seeds.
Tonight, we will meet in our dreams
Sharing delirium
At the point called “now”
Where your story of a myriad generations
Subtly adapting and changing in the
Arid lands new-formed
After the great melt
Greets the plans and projects and blight
Of that one curious creature
Busily reforming the map of your home
To his will.
But you have shared dreams with this creature before,
With waves of immigrants
Passing and settling
Planning and fretting,
The Clovis, the Apache, the Texan.
What secrets
Have you stolen from their thoughts?
What memes
Have you embedded in their minds?
You learned to attract the
Flying Hawk Moths
Who nightly track your scent to its source
Whose improbably long tongues gently
Frolic with your stigmas
In a pollination ritual.
Some of you gave more powerful visions
To the brave and devotional
Who prepared you and partook of you
Their fears turning into monstrous daemons
Multi-headed
With dripping fangs and
Oozing stingers.
Some of you gave surcease of pain.
Some gave spirits freedom from corporal confinement.
Some gave knowledge of the future
And revealed places present yet unknown.
Were the seeds of those most admired nurtured?
Were they given vital water when it was dry?
Were their competitors removed?
These curious creatures
Likely helped make you what you are.
Just as you helped make them.
Should the desert turn to a smoldering fire
Of perpetual aridity
Or floods never seen before that scour it bare,
Will you survive and thrive,
Recast and adapt?
Who will be left to save you?
But that one curious creature
Who completes the mission you implanted in its genes.
~~~~~
James H. Blanford is a retired environmental scientist. He was born in
Minnesota and currently lives in Alamogordo, New Mexico. He is waiting,
with great curiosity, to see what happens.