Urtica plilulifera. Photo source: Wikimedia Commons; Photo Credit: © Jean Tosti
The dew upon the grass is laid like pearls
Flung down before the feet of feral pigs,
The stinging nettles hold their angry swirls,
While fruiting trees grow leaves without the figs.
–
The walls are broken and the foxes hide
Amongst the vines that they have stripped of grapes.
“Be careful, sisters: see the serpent glide,
‘Mongst leprous hyssop where no cleansing waits.”
–
The broken cistern holds no water back,
The spring is choked into a stagnant mire,
Decay and corruption leave the water black,
While withering plants are fit for naught but fire.
–
The suffocating thorns pluck at my skirt,
They smother where the crocus-flowers grew,
The wormwood has the lilies deathly hurt,
The rose grows thorns – it never blooms anew.
–
The vultures feed upon the dead gazelle,
While worms and flies its bloody surface blanch,
The doves distressed sound their starved nestlings’ knell
Upon the cankered almond’s naked branch.
–
Amongst the dust, who shall return to dust,
To rocky outcrop where the cave is cut,
We come with grief, and with as much disgust,
To look upon sin’s triumph and death’s glut.
–
For here, within Creation’s corrupted power,
The good disordered and the just condemned,
‘Tis naught but hopeless tribute for an hour,
Our efforts to embalm decay contemns.
–
O grief! The myrrh drops from our open hands,
Upon the stone that has been rolled aside…
Our enemy’s seal the robber not command?
The tomb stand spoiled in lost paradise?
–
Yet even while the shock would let our tears,
E’en as we flee in dazed, confusing fears,
And when at last return to weep our grief,
The Gardener comes His victory to bequeath,
Who reigns for ever o’er the starry sphere,
While round His brow the scars of thorns appear,
Through thistle, brier, blood, and stinging leaf,
He comes to all restore – to life and peace.
Cherry Foster
Handmaid's Distaff 
