Days of Contradiction, Testament of a Witness - Dirk Dunning

[Lawrence Robinson]

Days of Contradiction, Testament of a Witness


I have stood in seasons that brimmed with themselves—
the blackberries swelling in their purple night-skins,
the pears breathing sugar into their flesh,
plums softening toward the hand,
apples rounding into the slow curve of September—
and all the while the air was thinning,
the wings of the birds clipped not by predator or storm,
but by the vanishing of what they fed upon.

The virus and hatred moved like scythes through the fields—
not the crops themselves,
but those who tended them:
the pickers bent double in the strawberry rows,
the packers whose lungs filled with more than dust.
Orchards stood heavy with unpicked fruit
that fell to earth, feeding only the flies,
while grocery shelves gaped like missing teeth,
and hunger crept into houses that had forgotten its face.

I have seen the daisies arrive where grass once held sway,
then yield to the white coronets of Queen Anne’s lace—
their roots clutching the earth
as though to hold it from sliding away;
each stem a small insistence,
each bloom a brief argument against erasure.

Around me, the republic rots—
a slow, quiet demolition by hands
that know neither the weight of law
nor the grace of restraint.
The markets hum their false song
(how they love their golden mathematics!)
even as the world’s great ledger marks our deficit
in rivers gone dry, in air grown fevered,
in the counting of species that will not return.

I have watched the heat fall like a hammer on the day—
compressing breath, bending the will.
Tell me, you who inherit this diminished earth,
what shall we call this fever that will not break?
And somewhere beyond the horizon,
wars gather themselves like storms—
each front a continent of sorrow,
each silence an omen written in smoke.

Still, the mask covers my face—
a thin fabric of refusal—
while others stand bare before the invisible teeth of plague,
choosing ignorance as their only shield.
Blue screens flicker in their eyes like false dawns,
erasing thought, softening the edge of care,
until genocide passes unremarked,
until the only sound is the hum of machines
and the absence of wings.

Yet here I stand in the orchard,
hands sticky with the harvest that remains,
the juice warm as blood,
the sun on my shoulders like a benediction—
bearing witness to a world
that dies and flowers in the same breath,
that carries, in its very dying,
the seeds of what it was,
and what it might yet become.

	- Dirk Dunning