The Nameless Leaf
—The Tree Beneath the Unremembered Sky—
I knelt beside the window as the embers
collapsed into their final crimson prayers,
while roots beneath the garden’s frozen tongue
held secrets deeper than the graves of kings.
The old tree leaned against the midnight glass,
its branches writing shadows on the wall,
and I, exhausted by the weight of years,
yearned for eternal rest beyond the world.
The void received me slowly, like a tide
that knew the names of every drowned desire.
I walked through fields where even echoes died,
where silence wore the garments of the dead.
Yet in the marrow of that endless dark,
I heard the memory of your bitter voice —
your acidic tongue that once released its venom
and left its winter burning through my veins.
I carried every word you cast like stones,
each syllable a weapon without shape;
they built a kingdom underneath my flesh,
a monument of sorrow and of rage.
But somewhere in those wounds, beneath the ash,
something unseen began to push upward.
The roots beneath my feet grew warm with rain,
though no cloud crossed the desolate sky.
I searched for answers written in my blood,
but found a language older than my grief —
a script that moved like branches through the earth,
a living alphabet of loss and love.
The names I buried did not turn to dust;
they travelled downward, becoming roots
that fed the tree I thought had stood apart,
the tree that had been breathing through my bones.
And when I entered the deepest night,
where neither heaven nor oblivion spoke,
the tree remained — unchanged, immeasurable;
its roots beneath the place where I had fallen,
its leaves above the silence of the stars.
No voice descended from the distant dark.
No hand revealed the mystery I sought.
Only one leaf loosened from the highest branch,
though no wind moved and no season turned.
It crossed the hollow distance without falling,
as though the air itself had learned to hold it.
It bore no word, no mark, no familiar sign —
only a faint impression, warm as living skin,
of something almost recognized, almost remembered,
like a door once touched in a forgotten dream.
I reached toward it; the leaf became the night.
The night became the silence of my hand.
And there, where nothing ended and nothing began,
I stood beneath the tree I had been seeking —
not knowing whether I had found its roots,
or whether its roots had found me.
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