Giant Trees


Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam anywhere, not an origional mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe.
							-J. B. Priestley

Night.
Cold and dank in the room that is the world.
As it is, always,
Unforgiving.

Night eyes watching cold time pass.
Night eyes waiting, perched high in a tree.
A tree of glitter and glass, a tree higher than no other.
A tree full of eyes and ears and lights.

The squal of nature when nature is dead.
Sounds not sounds, just noise, filling up space.
Everything filling up space.

Night ears, listening for the sound of a tree falling.
A tree falling where nobody can hear it fall.
Night ears can only hear the noise
That justifies what the Night eyes can see-
Night.

Night light waiting, cold and dank.
On a corner of the tree of liquid sand,
On the floor in a forgotten room.
No more in the sky where once it burned endlessly,
Warm and forgiving.

Night eyes waiting for the shadows to come-
Procrastinating, suspended in animation.