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Saturn, the Gardener
by Sheikha A.

He enters graveyards on train wrecks,
Cerberus at his heel. Earthly visions

haunt his memories of the Horseman
he watched sickle his way through

land’s chest; slit it wide and plant
seeds of these blooms – the one final

meal. They began to fall the way
moths do in the absence of flame –

hunger and home. He lived to last
watching the earth cocoon bodies

in a vine-grip and snatch them
into its embrace, dissolving skin,

bone and flesh as compost of life
for the eternal fire. The food of crop

never found his mouth – his hunger
dormant like centuries of evolution –

but he lived long enough to watch
the world birth and decay out of soil

red as carnage, carnelian as life,
and black as breath. Time elapses,

he watches the metal car creak
into the curb; this land people visit

for the beauty it hosts – hunger
for food, delicacies unheard of;

only his eyes see the truth of beauty,
the heedless desire for exotic places;

and the soil famed for richness,
growing blooms promising immortality.

They lumber out – masses of fodder;
Cerberus mewling in stirred patience.

His animal has been good.
He might leave him the bones.

Fiction © Copyright Sheikha A.
Image courtesy of Rie Sheridan Rose.

More from author Sheikha A.:

Nyctophiliac Confessions:
Poems by Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee

“The night is cold enough to inspire poetry,” says Sheikha A. in her poem, “Reading My Bones.” This is the basis of Nyctophiliac Confessions – poems that are introspective and luminal, poems that require a certain amount of silence and space to be fully formed and appreciated. Reading these poems, I imagined that they were the kind of poems that assert themselves unbidden during a bout of insomnia. (A nyctophiliac being someone who loves the night or loves darkness).

Nyctophiliac Confessions is the 17th installment of Praxis’ chapbook series and contains twenty-six poems written by two poets, Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee, interspersed with abstract paintings by Robert Rhodes.

Available Here!