Creature Speak

Flashes of dying from the moving music.  

A bittersweet melancholy song emanating from waning cells.  A setting sun, so beautiful, even though you know it will soon be swallowed by night.

Thirsty trees and grasses, yellow in Summer, getting ready to let their dry appendages go, pieces that steal too much rain from their roots.

I never did well with transition.  Like a ficus tree moving residence, my leaves drop.  An orchid in the wrong light never flowers.

But life is one long, slow and constant changing.  And growing is dying, after all.

We shift without realizing, until one day we are someone else.  Something passed away gently through the age, and we never said goodbye.

Sometimes it left so quietly you never noticed it was gone.  A strange emptiness inside, subtle and faint as a whisper in a gust of wind, or a teardrop in the morning dew.

And the fields must be sewn again to reap the harvest in time.  Tilling the soil, stirring us up and turning us about.

A kind of violence comes over you until soft hands pat you down with new seeds in your heart.  

Waters of grief nourish roots.  Some seeds sprout in the cold and some in the heat.  Some grow towards the sun, brazen and brave, to be seen in full color by the bold.

And some grow in the light of the Moon for the bashful breeds and delicate creatures who’d burn away in the light of day.

And some don’t grow towards any light at all, for shadows are their fuel.  Shady aspirations for those with sensitive eyes and skin.  

Petals and leaves with secret colors only visible to the ones who can see in the dark.

Copyright © Sheyorah Naify, 2021