In the beginning was the commune.
Otters tended orchids by the rivers,
beaver pelts were not collected by kings.
Nothing was a moment before new switchgrass,
the beat between a sparrow trill or buzz.
Even the empty spaces were mosaic and motif,
water cascade and current, or stagnant bloom,
rock dimples pockmarking deserts and tundra.
Crepuscular, diurnal, nocturnal neighborhoods
were mutually timed fellowships and dinners,
sustaining each other in a community of meat.
Light was bound to dark in the first watered eye.
Isthmus, island, peninsula, archipelago, shoals
made homes for albatrosses, gulls, cormorants.
There were moonflowers, bats, fireflies, and racoons,
navigating, or day-dreaming, by stars and lunar light.
There were different hominids who became us,
who saw and felt patterns and rhythm,
sculpted sound into poetry, music, science,
who buried their dead with flowers,
who tamed wolves with leftover hunts.
The people who became us lived under oaks.
In the canopy two rat snakes were in love,
spending their days in a warm caduceus.
The grove was in the center of a forest garden.
The people who became us learned to prune
branches, plant scrub, nurture thicket and copse,
to favor fruits and vegetables, please prey,
court turkey, auroch, deer, pheasant.
When the people who became us started farms,
tilled staples, husband sheep, the snakes warned,
“If you make more food than you can eat,
you’ll attract rats, more than we can eat.”
But the rats brought cats and owls,
living in the things we now call barns.
So people laughed at the rat snakes,
who said, “that’s not what we meant.”
The people who became us fired shaped earth
to bury urns of grain dead in the ground,
until there was more than anyone needed.
Culture served nature with divorce papers.
In the end I work at the Wal-Mart.
Adam Turl and Tish Turl, Born Again Labor Tract 38: In the Beginning was the Commune - mixed-media collage and painting, digital prints, acrylic, stickers, wig hair, glitter, graphite, marker, cotton and ash on stretched canvas, 36 x 48 inches (2025)
This poem was originally published in Locust Review 13 (Winter 2025/2026)