Hope and Other Mistakes

Her words were inhibited, reluctant creatures that peered out and stared at her at the darkest hours of the nights when she wasn't looking. The signals of the towers veered away from their path and the dish antennas rotated their faces to save themselves from the flashes of silence. Mushrooms grew on the concrete, red with scent of morning dew and petrichor. The tar of the highway melted in the sun till it became the first sheet of solidifying lava on the new born planet.

She wanted to plant a jungle and meander a web of clouds at the foot of her rain trees. Her rivers would rise higher than the sky and her mountains purple and gold would sink with the sun and trick the daylight to persevere just a little while longer. And her words would grow in it. They would feed on the darkness of her soul, on the moonlight, on the starlight and on the silky whisper of the scops owl’s wings. They would blossom shy and forbidden like the orchid, dense and golden, shimmering like the dodder and lulling the bees into afternoon siestas on their cradling boughs.

The fledglings that had been pushed off of their nest at birth in their siblings’ struggle for survival flew home to her forest. The snakes bathed in the bubbling brook and lounged on the sunny rocks, photosynthesizing. The lost poachers sat spellbound at the splendour of the fiery orange family of the tigers. The forests encroached upon the villages on its glossy green margins and the villagers disintegrated their stilted mud huts to contribute wood to the lone beaver’s dam project.

There would be dynamites bursting mountains open for their peeling sheets of mica, not far off. The blast would resonate through your blood and instigate the baby ant in the anthill to ask uncomfortable question to its mother. There would be fireworks in the ridge that signalled where the radicals would meet to chalk their next invasion. But the wind in the stray strands of wild maize would have eyes only for the firefly.

As long as the wind giggled through her mossy forest floors, kicking up a storm of rusting leaves from last autumn... there would be hope. There would be rays of sun falling upon nests lined with feather down and eggs as blue as poison waiting for the breath of spring. There would be forgotten hoards of acorn hidden in hollow trunks by forgetful squirrels that the lost hunter would stumble upon.

He would believe. He would let her forest be.