Sunlight stealthily climbs the cold winter tree
A ghost monkey, made of light.
What was green, lost color to the earth,
Only to be draped in the blanket of white snow.
White by dark moonlight,
It’s bared dark by the truth of the Sun.
And below lay wolf cubs.
Duality of birth,
beneath the fruitless tree
Nestled in the cold lap of abandonment.
Something within him stirs,
Maybe it’s the ghost monkey climbing up his spine.
What’s abandoned, isn’t forgotten by anything but that which left it.
And so it is found.
And fed, and sustained.
The winter snow falls another six days,
But none comes to claim the hungry wolves.
And so they stay.
In a meagre shepherds’ hut
Under the tree with the steadily receding ghost monkey.
He feeds them as his own,
For he has none.
Does he then know, to feed as his own?
Or is what’s being fed, left increasingly undone?
Another month of harsh skies,
The ground rises up,
The hut is almost submerged,
A mere coffin.
The ghost monkey only skims the unburied tree-tops.
And takes with it all the food.
Leaving behind, but three hungry animals.
But can animals truly control hunger?
Or does this hunger control them?
Hunger forgets but doesn’t forgive,
The hand that no longer feeds it.
So as he slept,
In the coffin beside the tree,
Both draped in the same blanket.
Delirious hunger, palpable, like ticking time;
Starts dancing in a frenzy.
The wolves feel it stronger,
Maybe the moon touches their dark more.
Almighty howl, preying to the Lord of provisions,
They devour the hand that fed them.
The ghost monkey returns,
But sees only a burrow,
With a red and brown white.
And eight footprints, that disappear in unison.
Maybe the snow foretold the fall,
And enveloped all it could.
Maybe that which is abandoned will always find its own way.
For what’s been empty is finally at rest now.
And what was once abandoned, leaves its footprint.
