Larina Warnock
It Didn’t Fall in a Day
The last shade tree in Terafel
shimmied like the last desert
dancer who had, days before, closed
eyelids of a dozen lovers, dying one after
another in a shower of sky
rock and rage. We could not gauge
which god we had angered or how long
the apocalypse would go on, so we whispered
like wind, danced a dozen dances to the rhythm
of sky drumming earth, of dying. We stopped
believing it would end when it didn’t.
No reason remained to stay, but the way
to somewhere else remained a mystery,
so we stayed and we loved and we played
and we shimmied until we could not shake
a single piece of fruit from that tree.
_______________
Larina Warnock is a neurodivergent writer with an autoimmune disease. She lives in Southern Oregon with her husband, three dogs, and a turtle older than she is. Her work has appeared in Rattle, MetaStellar, Space & Time Magazine, The McNeese Review, and others.
Backstory: “Each year, I participate in National Poetry Month’s “NaPoWriMo” by writing one poem each day for the month (or, if I’m honest, close to one poem each day for the month). A few years ago, I started struggling to identify a topic for these pieces, so I wrote a status on Facebook that I would use a word or short phrase from the comments in each daily poem and then send a copy to the person who posted the comment. I wrote this piece last year to the prompt “shade tree.” My brain leans speculative, and I’ve always wanted to write an apocalypse poem. Someday I might even figure out where Terafel is.”
Editor’s Notes/Image Citation: A still of the Jujube tree from the YouTube “An Amazing Desert Adapted Fruit Tree” Edge of Nowhere Farm, Aug 27, 2022 subsequently filtered through a ToolWiz prism filters.
