Casey Gilfillan

I had been walking for days, walking for days when I saw the tree.

The leaves were black crisps, the tree itself shrouded in the hood of a flame,

A flame small enough to swallow monsters, big enough to devour men.

Who could resist, the trunk bellowed; ashes freckled my outstretched palms.

Baptized in the charred remains of loss, they sought their maker so intensely

That they paid no mind to the wooden pyre and began to claw upwards. Seeking

Salvation; searching the bleak, spotless sky as the scorned sage might, yet

There was nothing, save the sun, to whom the bloodied paws were none but lambs.

.

Aching and dripping they were, my hands; my fingers shaking and my jellied legs

Slowly molding into casts of stone, I cried out in a fervent joy something so pure and true

That my heretic tongue leapt into the burning bush:

.

Who belongs to the stars and the sky, I asked the day and she did not know.

I belong to the soles of her path, I spoke as the wind washed my belligerence in blood.