Ashes of Becoming

Remembered are the echoes of stone cracking under the weight of mountains,

yet even granite crumbles,

its edges softened like old voices fading into the hush of wind.

Forests once stood like cathedral pillars,

their green hymns sung in chlorophyll tongues,

but bark splits, rings collapse inward,

and roots twist inward surrendering to soil,

a slow unraveling into silence

amidst the rustle of dying leaves.

Oceans, too, are not eternal;

their tides hiss, bite and gnaw at cliffs like patient teeth,

grinding monuments into sand,

sand into whispers,

whispers into dust.

And flesh,

bright with pulse,

quick with hunger,

becomes the fleeing witness of brittle parchment,

a library of bones that Nature leafs through

until the words dissolve into but another dust mote.

Yet dust is not an end.

It is a migration,

Spiraling toward the sky.

Each particle, a traveler disguised as ruin,

slips upward into the breath of the ether,

riding the invisible currents extravagantly

like seeds of forgotten galaxies.

Atoms scatter,

not lost but enlisted,

joining the shimmer of comets,

the drift of starlight,

the architecture of new wings,

new leaves,

new rivers of fire.

Existence does not vanish.

It rearranges.

Dust is only the pause before another journey,

the ticket punched for passage into Nature’s next design.