Grass Story.

In this story grass made the world. First, there was nothing – as always – then grass began, sending its runners sideways and down, balling into everything. Roots and coils of stalk, leaflets knitted together brown, began the hard work of making soil to stand in. They thrust up blades, green sails to the light streaming from emptiness. They reached and bent, raising waves of winds, a shout of crickets and meadowlarks. Their mulch of root and leaf, black soil for rooted beings, sustains. Great herds wander it – antelope, okapai, cattle with horns long and sharp as bamboo. Horses rise from it, men. When grass sleeps, it dreams the stars. Awake, it summons clouds and thunderstorms and the rush of ungulates. It is all the world. If fire arises, burns it to blackened root, burns it to ash – gone, there is that within it, unseen, that sends forth root and blade, the juice in the cane, the reaching that will green again.