Death Seeding Life

In the shadowed corners of the world,

where roofs are dreams and meals are myths,

populations thin like mist at dawn,

bodies folding into the earth like letters never sent.

Hunger gnaws like rust on iron bones,

malnutrition paints children in the pale hues of forgotten fruit.

Weather, a tyrant with no face, lashes skin and soul alike,

its breath a blade,

its silence a tomb.

Death is not a single note, but a symphony of endings,  

a glacier calving into the sea,

a forest sighing into ash,

a fox curled beneath frost-bitten bramble,

its last breath a whisper to the worms.

Even the stars die,

their light, a memory riding the backs of photons through the black velvet of time.

And yet…

beneath the carcass of a crow, its wings folded like burnt parchment,

a beetle burrows, carving catacombs in the flesh that once flew.

The soil drinks sorrow and spits out green.

A seed, no larger than a freckle on the wind, cracks open,

its first breath a rebellion against oblivion.

By the roadside, where tires hiss and dust forgets,

a flower lifts its face from the grave of a gnat,

petals blushing like sunrise on the cheek of a new world.