A Forest of Phantoms

Giants, they stretch bony fingers

to stir the clouds like a child 

disturbs the smoke of a fire.

Eternal, wise, older than Time,

(Time, that monstrosity invented by mankind!),

and powerless against the wearers

of so many fine, old rings.

They were once many,
filling the land

the way the stars populate the skies-

thickly, and with no end.

But there can be,

and an end seems fast approaching:

their deaths.

And so their sweet blood 

will shine darkly on the earth.

And so the nymphs will wander,

homeless, broken, lonely.

And so the bones of brothers

will burn or rot or lie forgotten,

as the ghosts

of giants stretch bony fingers

to part the rain

that finds graves and apartment complexes

instead of ash and oak.

The birds have gone. 

The berries have fled.

The rivers are brown with dirt,
their fish choked to death.

The child has grown .

The man is lured into the city.

He has left one graveyard for another,

in a monster that huffs

and puffs

and blows poison to the skies.

Phantom limbs sway

in so desolate a wasteland.

Their voices, once great and booming,

cannot move the stones.

They have joined the chorus in the sky,

the congregation of the old nations,

at the table of the ousted,

in the hall of the once free.

Ah, footsteps.

The man has returned,

tired of smoke and sick of steel cages.

His youth is fading, failing.

Too soon his heart will creak with years

it hasn't seen.

Old friends, he cries

as his shaking arms spread wide.

But the only answer is the echo of his own words.

Dust, blown by gray winds,

settle greedily on his shoulders,

hungry for roots to hold onto,

desperate for a home.

An old story, this.

Nothing but an old man,

come to pay his respects

to the companions of golden days past.

A squeal.

A giggle- brook music 

that hasn't sounded in years;

the streams to shocked to hear it. 

The stones awaken, daring, still, 

to hope.

It's a child, his daughter.

She scampers to his side, grasps his gnarled pinky,
brandishes her

stubby, chubby, grubby fist

like a knight might.

She holds in her other hand

new life.

A seed.