Tree of Life

Of the exploding star, and the cooling of the earth, and a Tree that all the universe conspired to create.

I existed in the shadow of history, when the stars were cold and learning to breathe. I existed in a scattering of plans, a flickering behind a nebula.

I remember, within the slants and bends of my branches, the scattering of photons. The accretion of matter. The molding of planets. I remember something of a forming song, the conductor lifting his baton in an arc the shape of a spiral galaxy’s arm.

In the spaces of my broken butterfly leaves is woven a symphony as rich as the Cambrian--the warm hum of vast prehistoric insects beating against my stolid form as the lines of the phylogenetic tree etch themselves in my soul.

You and I, we are the same single life. I die every death you die, and yet together we are immortal. I watch the red sun engulf the world. And we will not die even then--for still we will exist in the molecules, waiting to be seeded again.

I exist in the shadow of future. These buildings around me, so much taller than I--there is no breath in their beings, yet they too are part of the song. Perhaps the bar lines, or the ledger lines, upon which we must climb to ascend the universal scales.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. So is dictated the promenade dance, as new branches bud from meristems. So goes the song unending, bridging the light-year gaps between the stars, from point to point in the arcing sweep of the growing galaxy. Between the dead lightning rods of the apartment rooftops, and the clouds that circle the world a thousand times a day. Between the human, and the tree He left rising in the flowerbed.

Between the tree and Him. A rising melodic scale into infinity.

I alone am a map of the universe. And if you look close enough, you can see the stars in my cells--the very stars from which I was one day born, the stars that will one day kill their own.

Reviews

[Kevin Moore]

I love this piece! Very poetic prose! The first line is a bombshell! I love the comparison of life to music and of planets and stars to cells and molecules. Excellent work! There are a couple of grammatical and spelling errors and some punctuation glitches, but other than that it looks structurally sound. You have some real talent! Keep up the good work!

[Tessa Low]

Oh, it appears em dashes get turned into double inverted commas when published...I'll go fix that! Thank you for your compliments. :)