Dying for Life

The trees loosen their grip on summer
like tired hands releasing a long-held secret—
leaves drop in slow spirals,
rust and gold coins spent lavishly on the soil.
They disappear into a dark, breathing library
where worms write in silence,
turning endings into grammar roots can read.

Winter stands over everything like a paused clock,
white and skeletal,
yet beneath that stillness sap coils like a sleeping serpent,
waiting for the exact temperature of hope.

In this wild, decay is not shame
but industry.

Mushrooms lift their pale umbrellas
from mulch that was once thunderous oak,
now of soft bodies translating death into nourishment.

Fire comes too,
not cruel, but decisive,
a painter with a palette of ash and renewal.
Seeds burst open only after flame kisses them,
as if destruction were a locked door that only heat can persuade.

And salmon, bright flares in rivers, climb toward their ending,
flesh loosening into current and claw,
their dissolved bodies feeding forests
that never touched the sea.

From the accumulated skeletons of the small,
somewhere below the tides, reefs rise
cities built from the patient architecture of loss.
Plankton bloom and vanish like galaxies rehearsing in miniature,
each life consumed becomes breath for another.
Nothing escapes this economy,
not starfish, not whales, not us,
for we borrow existence from disappearance.

And at the edge of all beginnings,

often human sacrifice occurs like a young mother
opening like the horizon splitting dawn,
where undeniable love is forced into a terrible arithmetic,
as one pulse dims,
so another may burn bright.

Dying for life continues.