The Wooden Universe

This world is like the rest.
The trees with unseen gnarled branches
have elbowed out all rivals
or smothered them under vast blankets of green.
As we skim the leaf tops
there is nothing but this swaying sea of foliage.

Look at it again, for there is nothing else to see:
we must begin to wonder why we came so far,
hurtling through the dark,
if every destination is the same:
green leaves staring blindly up at their star.
If this is all there is and this is all that trees can do
they might as well be dead.
Even the music we play to stay sane,
strumming guitars or a single clear alto,
cannot lend this arid horde the least spark of panache.
Unfeeling, unthinking, unblinking,
they just go on at being green
for as long as they are seen.

How we crave some variety:
a clearing with a dwelling,
a column of smoke,
sign of some small flash of thought:
but there is only the living desert,
this self-replicating verdant virus
that chokes all planets that we visit.

And now one thought has grown into my green hell:
that like these pointless swaying trees
we are lucky accidents,
dull cellular machines,
who fool ourselves that we possess
some restless magnificence,
some meaning, beyond a tree or leaf,
or our blurred dream of green.

Peter Keeble