IN RESPONSE TO LI’S PROMPT-HIRAETH
Wistman’s Wood
Only the loneliest of lands leave you yearning
Do you ever lay your hand against the trunk of a tree and imagine it
waking? A benediction for solidity, a prayer for some wiser
kind of life. Perhaps that is only my holy, for I do not know what is good
anymore. Who is god anymore. I spent Sunday worshipping in a church I
used to know. There I found a thousand years of windburn and
gnarled flesh curled by the hand of desolation. I laid down inside the
moss, inside the damp palm of that consecrated ground and I was lost, lost
in a cradle of swamp. Above me, I saw a sap-scabbed branch that bled
another’s name. I could not help but think of you: you who I did not
meet. You who I would not hold. You who stroked the hollow of my throat and said:
only these loneliest of lands leave you yearning.
The sun spread its riches across the canopy and I smiled then, for every lost
thread. For every life I could not know.
