watch the sunrise from forty flaps of birdflight still not high enough to touch the swaying canopy.
Proud as you are, growing upon that peeling pine your only freedom is the wind that lifts your leaves. Momentarily, they are wings.
I may never understand your ambivalence, suffering the rain catching the biting dew. Why allow the elements to bend your fronds when your trusted bough can’t ever shelter you?
I can only grieve for the day that death finds your tree.
—Anne Carly Abad
