In the beginning was the commune—otters tended orchids by rivers, beaver pelts were not collected by kings,
nothing was a moment before new switchgrass, the beat between a sparrow’s trill or buzz.
Even empty spaces were mosaic and motif, water cascade and current, stagnant bloom,
rock dimples pockmarking deserts and tundra, crepuscular, diurnal, nocturnal neighborhoods—
mutually timed fellowships and dinners, sustaining 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, racoons, navigating, night-day-dreaming, by stars.
The different hominids who became us saw and felt patterns and rhythm, turned noise into poetry,
music, and science, buried their dead with flowers, tamed wolves with leftover hunts.
The people who became us lived under a forest garden’s oak.
In the trees two rat snakes were in love,
spending their days in a warm caduceus.
The people who became us learned to prune branches, plant scrub, thicket and copse, favor fruits and vegetables, please prey, court turkey, auroch, deer, pheasant.
When the people who became us started farms, the rat snakes warned them:
“If you make more food than you can eat, you’ll attract rats, more than we can eat.”
But rats brought cats and owls with them, living in things
we now call barns. So people laughed at the 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.
I work at the Wal-Mart.
* Ahmad Shamlou was an Iranian poet, communist, and dissident. “In the Beginning was the Commune” is inspired by Ahmad Shamlou’s 1963 poem, “Thus Feet Firmly Planted on the Earth” translated from Persian to English in 2023 for Locust Review.
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)