TREES
Pay no attention to the story that he was left in the dirt of the desert.
No,
it was higher up,
in the humid and sloping woods—
branches crystallise the sunshine there.
It was in this shaded place that he was left,
the predestined child
who lies so strangely quiet in the patchwork light.
No cry of pain
no call for rescue,
does he almost know what lies ahead:
the horror and hardship?
For he will be found,
someone is foraging nearby who will stumble here soon.
It is like a labyrinth where he is going,
a walled-in world quite unlike
this green and rustling shelter
where sometimes there is the crack of a stem
and always the camouflage net of light
broken up in fragments,
while the child in the brief peace and needing no company
is free in the home of the mountain god