My son, stopped during our walk through
a eucalyptus forest to his school and said:
“mummy, the trees are talking to us.”
I stopped too and listened along with him to the trees’ rustle.
“It’s the wind mummy,”
he exclaimed,
then blew a puff of air onto the back of his hand.
“The trees talk through the wind.”
Another time she said to me
“When I die, mummy,
I want Mother Earth to turn me into a flower.
And you will be a petal in my flower.
So will my sister.”
He added that grandmother will be another flower
growing next to her, “a friend.”
The wind’s soft static in the pine trees above
and the air fragrant with pine, he added more softly:
“But we don’t decide what we are after we die.
Mother earth decides.”