needles scraping bone,
heel and sole.

sliding cold inside your boots
you bear the weight of all you love,
while inches underneath
the giant gods of other worlds relay
their shepard songs.

empty aqua loneliness.

they disappear,
soaring softly into darkness and
sinking,

willing,

deeper than the sky is wide.

their dreams are of a solid state;
the breath that leaves their backs a
force of nature,

strong enough to rent the field on which you stand that now,
to us,
seems still as stone.

a ruined bed, two lovers lay,
outside, the first slow breath of day,

a song is sung - a bird, up high,
born years ago, somehow survived

the rip and tear of tooth and claw,
hatched from a nest that did not fall,

a slender limb that did not break
on sleeping earth that did not quake

grown old and tall and straight and wide,
a withered seed that never died,

blown from afar on autumn breeze,
stirred from the ground with careless ease,

a little boy raking the ground
looked to the sky, and heard the sound
of birds