It started with a pulsating
in the heart of the oldest tree in the world,
observed by Jasmine, her eyes a deep azure—
biologist and caretaker of the old oak.
It stretched like an organic gelatine mass,
rising and falling as if breathing—
the globulin center bulging like an ageing gut
leaking glistening obsidian resin
atop the last hill, dripping down, gleaming,
where forest once writhed and wound for miles around,
the land now flattened and plaster cast,
the tree alone and surrounded by the gray city,
home to a lost population not long for this world,
that did not see,
that had no need
for the tree that was cheered and revered
by Jasmine alone.
Outsider. Outcast.
Yet, with the tree, never alone.
She reached out to place her palm on its cracking, blackening bark,
before the gas-masked men in hazmats cordoned it off.
Stay back. Step away. An infection, they say.
But there was nothing they could do as the land above
where the roots grew began to turn gray,
and what flora and fauna remained turned ashen and died,
disintegrated, struck by a sharp wind, drifting away.
The tree’s limbs slackened and withered slight,
and the once lush green leaves Jasmine had nurtured fell,
the light in her eyes fading, azure to gray,
sent for decontamination and treatment
as her skin began to blister and bubble—
never to be seen again.
But the tree did not die, for something kept it alive.
That black beating heart inside, harder and faster now.
Deep scarlet veins reached out from within
like bloody skeletal hands wrapping around,
growing on the outside, a myriad of vessels
like a harlequin baby
that writhed, reaching out further for the gray city
with a silent cry.
Terraformers toiling on a distant star
could not have seen nor known
that their work angered a voiceless consciousness
unknown to humankind,
for they could only comprehend what they could see.
Their efforts to turn seemingly barren worlds
into another Earth,
chasing a nostalgic dream,
a one done thing,
only to poison it in the blink of an eye before
moving on to the next
and the next,
while unknowingly corrupting and destroying
all that the all-seeing eyes had known
since before the beginning of time.
It had watched as humans began to spread among the stars
after laying waste to their home of green and blue,
toiling away,
turning it as gray as the dull minds
of the inhabitants of the day,
who neither saw nor spoke of stories and oak,
but lost their way in artificial worlds and work
and didn’t stop to question why.
If the oldest oak in the world could not be seen,
the all-seeing eyes would molest and corrupt
and spread its wrath for all to see—
as the sky turned black,
where day never came, casting shadows no longer,
as the land turned black,
stretching to the streets
in the concrete city that turned black
from hacked up phlegm
from char-grilled lungs from
blackened bodies stepping over
lifeless bloated black bodies.
The bleeding black oak glowing red atop the hill,
the only light in the sky, rising
above for all to see—
who raised their heads and opened their eyes,
transfixed by the open chest of what was once
the old oak tree,
revealing now that bleeding, black beating heart.
