{Excerpt}

It’s a broken bough, hanging low, the cracking and inimical snapping, under the weight of heavy wintertide snow,

an earth tilt—gravitational pull, bark unfurled and pulp unfettered, an umbilical hold, with the strength of an inch, life still exists,

and all that dies and hollows, serves the seed, the life extension, like Death’s contradicting forces, a compulsive rattle of genesis,

Spring has a horizon, and upon her breast, emblazoned in gold and fire, will be the shadow of a sapling, slight and defenseless, rising in will.

I am but a minute, an inconsequential placeholder of time, in the life of passers, I’m lost in the blink, at best a fade in clarity upon the line,

but I give sense to the void, my roots extending, young braided within the aged, knotted and indecipherable of origins,

I am an extension, I am nothing less than the entirety of that very tree, I am the wound, it’s undoing and undying, I am a purpose and virus of it’s every memory and thought yet to light,

I am the grand of inception, a lineage of resilience and determination, a humble tree that broke ground, and enfolded a headstone, willingly embracing its endearing cold, where the warmth of mortal love had been discarded.

E.A. O'Connell. January 2019