The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration. A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments.
Even the memory of love lasts only so long, and has to fade, as if from cold, like breath of the night. How strange it is that two more towering trees, hardy and sharp as they are, should meet and then fall in perfect balance like an old door, but still there is in the background a suggestion of sunshine and a bird sings a song of song to the rustle of the leaves, when the roses are bright and the yews still leafless and brown.
A bird sang with such intense meaning, which it had only heard once, when it had lived in harmony with its creator. But now it feels as though it had lived in the song, and its existence is as brief as that of its ancestors, which did not die because they had forgotten their time, or because they had no time, and their love did not last as long as that of those roses, whose scent was theirs alone to enjoy.
The tree, of perfect beauty, is dead now, and has lost the story of its life. Farewell my lovers, dear sons. Your life ended when their time expired. The yew-tree lived on for another fifteen years before finally dying, like the son who lived on in the song. And so it was that as their love slept, the men of the land knew the memory of the child and the song of the bird, their love, and when the bird died and the rain fell
And the leaves and the bark and the roots no longer remembered the true name which was long forgotten, a mountain fell into the stream, and the water rose into the centre of the land, and changed it and the waterfall ceased to be a waterfall and became the Sea. How might we remember the dead, if we could bring with us the world, without sadness and anger, without jealousy and envy, without all the trammels of time? The memory of the children, and the bird, and the tree is as old as the trees themselves and as it becomes old and dead, it is absorbed into the living trees and all the stories are forgotten. But the poor roses die still, the one, and the many, they cannot remember the other, but die in the arms of the men who thought they knew them. What does the world mourn for?
The dead have no such love.
They simply know the terrible darkness of grief without end.
They know no great beauty.
Their skins are no richer than those of the living.
Only the people who live, who suffer, who weep, and perhaps remember, could say that they lived once. so the song, the memory, was sung for what it was worth and the memory of love was stillborn.
But the leaves had started to fall again, and the wind blew from the sea, where the dead rose from the bottom of the water. It was the tears of the people that awoke the dying trees
So that they may grow, as in time they will die and so us all.
:: 10.04.2022 ::
E.P. Robles | Poetry 