Once the woods turned grey there was no going back.
He watched it happen with disbelief clouded in his eyes
as the trees turned ashen and age crumbled up their trunks.
The leaves at the very top were the last to go
They held out like a prayer
seeming to stretch a little taller, cry a little louder
but soon they paled
succumbed to the frost that claimed their brothers
The soil too had turned to dust
He knelt and tried to hold some in his hand,
but there was nothing left to hold.
His empty fingers cupped his empty ears
as he realized a silence
he had never heard before,
that no one had ever heard
before the woods turned grey.
He ceased to notice time
when the wind could no longer move
and the branches lay still as ghosts
The whisperings of life that marked each hour
were now forever tacet
and without them
he could not know how long he knelt
huddled in the ancient dust
of the woods turned grey.
He stayed there,
contained in the color of his last breath
Those greens and browns and blues
He had breathed into himself just a moment ago,
just a second
Before the woods turned grey
He stayed there
until the ash covered up his feet.
It followed the creases of his fingers
and crept up the lines above his clouded eyes
It took all the time in eternity
but that isn’t very long at all
And when it reached that last breath
the living air he held so close
it gently, tenderly, lovingly
helped him crumble
into the woods turned grey.