The Vastness of the Sky

My tortured bones long for fire, yearn for the consummation of smoke and ash scattered by the wind to a beckoning end.

Once upon a time I was a massive, ancient tree but you broke me down and made a house of me.

I am the alchemy of long deliberation. After years of deep consideration, I pass judgment.

When I was a tree, you lived, made love, warred, died on the ground in which my seed sprouted and took root.

Your blood fed me as surely as rain and soil.

What once you did atop the earth whence I erupted, you continued to do beneath my branches as I strained toward the sky.

We changed and grew but in different ways.

I was firmly rooted, strong and supple, withstanding all that fate threw at me, but where my kin and I were absent, you were exposed to the wild predator and the tempest.

You were vulnerable, weak, few; we were many, firmly planted, and we thought we were secure.

First you took of our fruit and our sap, then you took our branches for shelter.

You stole pieces of us before you murdered us whole, like a lover who never planned to stay.

Then you built dwellings from our very bones, stripping away our skin and carving us up to fit your needs, amalgamating us with other dead things, dwelling, living and dying within us, even consigning your corpses to oblong boxes pieced together from our dismembered bodies, ironically buried again in the earthly home from which you robbed us so that we must return as dead and hollow as you.

And now you have all died, and I rot slowly with this dead consciousness, crippled into a shape you made for a purpose it can never again serve.

New trees grow within me. Eventually they will burst through the rotted rooftop and strain to the sky as I fall away around them.

Yes, I long for fire, but I am doomed to slow decay. Perhaps I will be a tree again, when the dust of my bones enriches the soil from which the new breed grows.

My judgment is thus: the sky belongs to nothing, and so do I, and so must you nothing behold, as once I beheld the vastness of the sky.