The Bones of a Forest

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The bones of a forest are stripped clean by the ocean and strewn on her shores. The sun-bleached wooden cemetery leaves a somber impression on the morning scavenger of shells, who meanders in the gray mist of a fall morning dawn. He is lulled by the hush of the fog and the rolling waves that break on a gravel strand. With a head bowed down and hands crossed behind him... he searches... searches for opalescent treasures... like answers to life's questions. Is this how it all started, or is there some grander purpose? Then a gull caws as if an angel calls the seeker's attention. And as he looks up his sight receives a message delivered by two brown pelicans sailing along a cresting wave. This was here before you... and it will continue when you are gone. But now... you are mine... and we are one... divine.

by Martin Braun
6:30 a.m. September 20th, 2023
Jenner, California
To my oceanic compatriots. They put our love under a glass dome, posted deterrent signs on the paths we created 35 years ago, and sealed off the oceans. If they heard my, your, stories, they would run the environmental Bolsheviks into the sea like the demon-possessed pigs that they are. These self-righteous propagandists closed Drakes Oyster farm with lies, and they, like gulag interrogators of 1936, threw us into a sort of prison within the spaces of our minds, torturing us by excluding us from "the motherland's environment", and created an unimaginable wasteland with the walls they built by a lust for power. We are of this world... it is they who are aliens. Let us enjoy what God made. We created the protections with our respect and love for the environment. The environmentalists simply make laws, criminals, and prisoners.

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