The breeze moves the trees in such a seductive manner.
They dance and they sway to a song no one else can hear.
The leaves are plucked one by one at the moments
where the rhythm is most wild. When the dance is most violent.
And over many seasons she grows to trust him more,
he grows to care for her deeply,
and this dance just isn’t enough anymore.
Every spring he returns
and stays through most the autumn,
eventually needing to leave
her bare skeleton behind;
waiting for her to be born again.
Though she stays firmly in the ground, rooted in the soil,
her branches tease and seduce the breeze-
her, naïve and unknowingly beguile.
With their wild movements
of her limber branches release her foliage.
Her children
sail the tides of his winding winds
as she looks up at their games from beneath.
They flutter around, spiral up and down;
they jump and they glide
in circles or from side to side.
The breeze pushes and pulls, taking the lead.
Trying its hardest to uproot and pull its complacent significant other
elsewhere.
He wants so badly to take her somewhere she has never seen,
to show her that there is more than this silly little Earth.
He tries and reasons;
he tells stories of colors beyond her imagination,
past the horizon where the sky is a smear of textures
and glows a pink milky chroma.
Oh, and when it touches the day’s blue
and the orange from the East, as it melts behind the mountains,
how it glows, how it explodes into a glorious line of white,
then fades away into night.
“We get sunsets here, she replies.
We have our own days and nights.”
“It is not the same.”
He tries to tell her of past and present civilizations,
the wonders of the world and mysteries of modern science.
He explains how there exists lands beyond the sea,
and amazing stories all of the fascinating people he has seen.
He shares his amusing tales
of the hats he has blown from heads,
scarves he has removed from necks,
rain drops he has pushed into peoples’ faces,
and storms he has guided over cities.
Oh, and for fun, how he loves
to prove the meteorologists wrong.
She is still not amused.
In place of curiosity,
all she experiences is fear.
“My love!” He cries, “Stay by my side!
We can dance, we can sway,
and we can watch your children glide.
“Come with me, I beg you,
follow me, would you please!
I swear I will protect you
and all your beautiful leaves.
You may root into foreign soils
and taste new and rich minerals of the Earth;
if there is anything you desire,
I will bring your there. “
But there was nothing…
“Fine then…
“There is a castle in the clouds, whispers the breeze-
far in the distance, long past the horizon.
There is a world beyond your own,
a tower of crystal and water which you will never know.”
He speaks low and in a bitter tone,
until this point, she had yet to hear
but it still hasn’t really dawned to her
though expressed rather clear.
He offers her one final dance,
she accepts,
and this final sway most violent of all;
he removes her branches of all their leaves
and carries them towards the clouds.
They skip and dance,
they spiral and spin,
not one of them looking down
at the tree, now left alone,
forever rooted in the ground.
