Peanuts are seeds.

How odd—
scores of them line her pockets
and she’s never planted one.
She pops one into her mouth
then remembers the shelter her grandmother
recommended before Death scored
points handling her capture.

Memory guides her, and
she feels lines deepen on her face
as she sinks beneath the canopy of ferns.

Contemplating shadows, Death marches by.
Cursing mud, cursing bugs,
cursing its unrelenting job as it
brushes by ferns, disturbing her—
interrupting the cadence of her heart’s
sturdy cabinet.

She sinks a peanut deep
into moist soil that feeds ferns,
and releases fecundity’s earthy scent,
reminding her that nothing ever really dies.

Her grandmother likened life to her café’s compost bin.
“Rotting vegetation fertilizes life,” she’d say.
“Energy never dissipates, it merely changes form, child.”

It took 48 years and a peanut
for that one to sink in.
From below, she could see her grandmother’s
face through the ferns.

Brenda Warren 2012

This is a product of the wordle words from The Sunday Whirl. I had no idea where it was going until it went there.  This is fiction.