I Am Present to Rejuvenation

© Kelleen Goerlitz 2022. All Rights Reserved. Do not use without permission

Steps of despair echo through air
the accompaniment
to a procession of shadowed souls

A tear broken with grief falls on an ashen leaf
the remainder
of a spirit in a drop
But on the nymphs march fading through
death’s march
the refuge
for those destroyed and forsaken

Yet before the fade, eyes of one still
yearning surveyed
the wreckage
of the forest left blackened by flame

Smoke hung in haunting — leaving the
nymph wanting
the memory
of a stream of sunlight suffocating in
suspended soot

The nymph’s lungs were held, gripped still
by flames that dwelled
the beasts
left inside to claw within at every rattle
of a breath

Still the nymph waited, seeing phantoms
though the flames had abated
the forest
left to perish, a graveyard of trees giving
silent skeletal screams

The nymph to a past love reached out, a tree trunk
now charred throughout
the motion
of a lover’s heart murmuring one last plea

But the whispered touch, the blackened
corpse could not handle such
the desolation
the final curtain drops with the crumbling of life
to ash

From scorched eyes a tear cannot be shed for
the spirit long since fled
the dissolution
of the magic found in a mere seed taken
root through centuries

With a whispered breeze the last nymph
faded still on its knees
the worshipper
a mere memory, a whisper without its deity

Gone were the whispers and echoes

Silence a heavy cloak to lay upon the
forest burned away
the grave
of reaching giants with leaved fingers
caressers of the sky

Breathless silence—the world forgot to breathe—
airless, too airless for vengeful flames to still seethe
the stillness
of more than life’s dance to death—but of
destruction leaving nothing left

But slightly below the surface of a leaf of ash where
embers ceased glowing and the flames did not thrash
the rejuvenation
of magic shines among the black, born from hope,
watered by a single tear—a vibration
of life
the might of one small seed