Through a Cooling Wood

Burying birds behind the shed.
Such light little things laid in the ground.

A last look at day falling into night.
No constellations or crickets – only gunfire and fear.

Storms roll in before midnight, dowsing man-made calamities.
The land needs this. I need this.
Love may exist as an instrument or tool one might not always need.
How blasphemous it feels to write such a thing.
How not like me.
And yet, I am not unhappy.

Cranes cry in the far field with the glow of fading light peeking through a cooling wood.

Honesty and fairness is what justice looks like.
Where is the justice in not allowing honesty?
The world around me is unjust because I, myself, am unjust.
I see that I have been lied to because I, myself, have lied.
How can we expect more from the world than we are willing to give?

I begin to confess in a slow yet deliberate unveiling of that which must decay.
Ash and smoke rises from the crumbling façade and just before settling into its afterbirth, an outline of hope burns through the loess.

She is in no more need of torches, beloved.

She is.