It's Still Life

Her Sentinel Trees

These are her sentinel trees,
watchers of her comings and goings.
It’s the second Friday of the month,
frost holding the air low and steady
as she leans back against a birch tree.

She, once a child of its slow growing
seed says to the tree, tell me a story
about a young woman who ran away
to the big city because she thought
green wasn’t enough for her, and

tell me that she knows now that her
instincts are drawn by shades of green,
that she is rooted in pungent petrichor,
that she is its moss and lichen, and that
she wants to exist in this forest where

longstanding truth rules as longevity.
Tell me a story, she said, how sentinels
waited for her. And the air caught her
every breath and word, and turned them
into clouds that vanished into winter sky.

Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2024.