Sea of Trees by Michael L. Utley

Image Source: Canva Pro

To slake my thirst

With dew from leaves that never see the light

Arboreal the tears that fall and quench

The darkest dreams

To fill my bowels

With loam whose cloying scent bespeaks of death

Arboreal the taste of living earth

My hunger begs

To see the gleam

‘Neath tenebrous shadows and rayless groves

Arboreal the blackest night in day

Below the boughs

To run rough hands

O’er scabrous bark and hardened boles and moss

Arboreal the pillars scrape the sky

In breezes weep

The silence holds

Forbidden knowledge

The silence holds

The universe

The silence holds

The truth

The path wends through

This living thing, this thing that sighs and cries

And dies and eats itself a cannibal

Whose roots betray sorrowful sentience

Whose trunks hold back the sky with anguished might

Whose limbs strain forth in melancholy pleas

A beckoning

A reckoning

The path into the gloom is just a path

With littered leaves and lichen on the rocks

And overhead the canopy to keep

The sky from falling down under the weight

Of lifetimes filled with torment and regret

It’s just a path

No need to fear

The forest welcomes me it knows my name

Envelops me in arms of somber green

It sings to me a song of silent peace

It pulls me down the path on wings of leaves

It whispers of a place where I may rest

And leads me there

There are others

Herein among the endless sea of trees

Herein among the caverns and the gulfs

Herein among the secrets and the cries

Which echo faintly in sepulchral voids

Herein where many come and none return

There are others

These are my kin

These shades that linger far beyond their time

And welcome me with soundless empty stares

And follow me along the darkling path

And shimmer as mirages in the air

And fade away as if they’d never been

Into the trees

The silence holds

Everything

Arboreal

My personal Aokigahara

My sea of trees my jade remembrance

There is a place just off the path ahead

A place of sodden leaves and broken twigs

And bitter cold that numbs away all pain

A resting place

I am not that boy who saw the sun

I have never seen the sun nor shall

I see only trees

-MICHAEL L. UTLEY

Mike is a deaf writer/photographer who lives in rural southwest Colorado, USA.  His love of nature shines through his poetry and photography, both of which he uses to make sense of his world.

Please visit Silent Pariah to read and view more of his wonderful work.

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