Hermetical Forerunning of Life

Heat...everywhere. Blinding heat, raging and rolling from every angle. Heat within the stars has no comparison to the heat
against my every side, scorching my every branch and leaf and bud.

Oh my friends, my lovers, my family - how they fell a midst the flames and fire - dark billowing smoke from the slowly perishing
young; slow gray smoke out of the fallen old. Why did you go - here I stand alone, the single oak a midst the graves of children
and friends.

Lo, even the critters, the furry friends who used to run amok through my feet of branches, burrowed and found shelter under my skin - where too have you gone? Away, you have, away from me - a hermit standing tall but singed, beaten and battered against
the storm of winds and flame.

No longer do I hear the songs of the breeze through family's hair - no longer the soft trill of the 'jays and the hovering drum beats of the hummingbirds - now just silence, endless echoes of nothingness. No home left to protect against stray storm or
lightning strike; here I stand, a monument to what once was.

Even now, laid deep beneath the smoke and ash, deeper still beneath my roots, I can feel it. The soft hum of you - my kin. I hear your soft earthly echo, no longer in screams and cries of pain but now; now in hymns of rebirth, now in love songs of the
spring.

I hear your once thought dead seedlings emerge from the dark soot emptiness. I hear the long-out calls of the 'jays. I hear you returning to me, returning home,
returning to where you belong.

No longer am I a hermit, a solitary monument to what was and will never be, a lonely reminder of past destruction; now,
now I am forerunner -
with my buds and fruit; they shall return anew and grown. Because of me, kin and friends shall return - the songs of the past are now the songs of the future; the drumming of the hummingbird, the trill of the 'jays and their young, the soft scratching from within as new small residents take up shelter within me.

Now, there shall be life - born beating back against the oppression of flames and fiery tyranny. Now there shall be life - singing hymns of past and future alike. Now there shall be life - so that when I too pass, others will take my place a midst the forest of songs and memories, the forest of what was and will be -

the forest of life.