Went by a forest devastated by fire and a sudden thought came of what the Traveler would thought and feel if after a long journey of searching he walked inside that smoldering landscape...

The traveler entered the blackened forest
where the fire was left to running wild,
lightning could be the punishment to trees
that to pray for rain they forgotten had,
or a malevolent spirit bend on destruction
igniting that all consuming fire was the one;
it wasn’t a welcoming landscape but a desert
that a crazy and demoniac of a madman
hat taken is brushes and damn with the muses,
when he decided to paint everything with black.

Wondered if Hell wasn’t colored in flame’s red
but with the darkest color of Absentias’s life,
where devils are hiding inside burning embers
waiting under ashes for naive travelers going by
and inflict searing pain as only fire knows how,
blistering the skin of sinners souls, unrepentant
spirits wandering from blooming Eden gardens
into a shadow landscape made from pure darks.
Maybe in a moment when God wasn’t looking,
Devil saw his time to burn a little of His Paradise.

He approached an old and gnarled by age oak tree,
that inferno on earth he couldn’t possible survive;
down its amputated branches lying on the ground
after with searing pain asking with a loud, “why?”
with sparkles and smoke like a dying grandfather
which for centuries didn’t but raise to the skies,
giving shadow to the needed on hot summer’s days
and to the little birds from the falcon a place to hide;
that old oak, if one thing, can represent the years
taken for granted when just one lightning make all ash.

The Traveler wondered in front of a cinder bush,
if Moses was ever in front of one like this one
without a voice telling about forty horizons ahead
on a desert made of hunger and a Golden Calf;
was faith moving those feet for so many years
looking for the last horizon and the Promised Land?
or they were just wandering on a burned forest
where trees had forgotten how to pray with times?
A charred rattlesnake is not dangerous anymore,
nor an eagle with all its feather burned is regal.

He was walking on a world devoid of little songs
where gone were the gossamer spider’s traps,
Creation born from the infinite kindness of love
destroyed with a little thing, perhaps it was a match.
Guilt no necessarily need to be world shattering,
but what kind of guilt a innocent forest could had
to deserve a visit from that demoniacal painter which
even innocence he was allowed to paint with black?
The Traveler moved away to the next greener horizon
maybe there he would meet God, if he moved fast.