Borderline

Oddly assorted bedfellows, frost and thaw 
ruckus under their scanty quilt of clay.
To them, spring comes as the final straw.
Their tortured nights are pictured plain as day 
in sudden humps and craters that we find 
in garden ground upheaved and undermined.

Tossing about, all elbows in the cramped 
embrace to which their restless kind are fated, 
their lust for loamy struggle never damped 
in all the years since they were strangely mated, 
neither has known the other's throes to yield 
to careless calm. Their bed's a battlefield.

Curious: what they fight is what they share 
a sullen trance where serial nightmares reign.
Scouting the damage spades will soon repair, 
shouldn't we feel less ready to complain?
Our cruelest dreams have yet to match the girth 
of these, that wrench the surface of the earth.


Spring's Awakening, by Robert B. Shaw