It is easy to gaze at the gentle curve to her trunk as she rises above the wall, blessed by the morning light. It is harder to look upwards, to the scant leaves held close to her body as the outer branches stick upwards, bare like talons. Dead fingers adorned by lichens, changing her summer costume from green to yellow. A colour that has the cloak of illness, like hepatitis -jaundiced, foretelling of death. Still, she provides a home for the mistle thrush who likes to sit on the upmost branch and a woodpecker who hammers away at a lower one, extracting bugs
If she were alone in this sickness, she would be a special provider. But she is not, there is a long line of her sisters, all the same. It’s like a plague, a death village. I force myself to look at this reality and feel a knot under my ribs.
Where do the souls of dead trees go?