The Lexicon of Beasts

17 Wednesday Dec 2025

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A murder descends without sound,
Black vestments of tattered priests;
They speak in the tongue of the drowned—
One hollow note, then silence feasts.

A parliament of eyes convenes
In ruin where the dark begins;
They measure what the stillness means—
The slow arithmetic of sins.

A lamentation drifts, of swans,
White elegies among the reeds;
They grieve for what the dusk has drawn—
The wound through which the evening bleeds.

A shiver of sharks patrols below,
Where drowned confessions drift like prayer;
Their eyes are glass, their hunger grows—
They feed on what no priest would dare.

A watch of nightingales takes wing
Above the graves the living leave;
They carry what we cannot bring—
The only hymns the dead believe.

A company of wolves at rest
Lies circled round an ashen stone;
Their breath ascends, a prayer unblessed,
To a god of moss, of root and bone.

A memory of elephants
Kneels among the bones decayed;
They hold the dust of continents—
The weight of all that’s cast astray.

A whisper of ghosts remains,
Still moving through the words we say;
We cursed the beasts with human pain—
And what we named has walked away.

Liturgy for the Discarded

16 Tuesday Dec 2025

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We gathered where the fluorescent altars hum,
In cubicles arranged like chapel pews,
And drank the bitter sacrament of numb
While serving gods who calculate our use.

They taught us young to sever root from soul,
To trade the forest’s tongue for plastic speech,
And we who measured progress by control
Choked out the last wild hymn within our reach.

The liturgy begins at half past five—
Alarm, commute through ashen rain,
And rush-hour pilgrimages to survive,
Our decades tithed upon the altar’s chain.

We bow before the god of compound growth,
Whose prophets speak in quarterly reports,
And sacrifice our children with an oath
Before their feral hearts can cut the cords.

The elders wear their watches made of gold,
And whisper that the market knows what’s best,
While ancient groves are gutted, priced, and sold
So shareholders may sanctify the rest.

I saw the rivers learn to burn,
The insects fall silent in their plots,
But priests in tailored suits said, “Why the concern?
The invisible hand connects the dots.”

When finally my body ceased to yield,
They thanked me with a card, showing me the door,
And left me where the stripped earth lay revealed—
With whale bones, wolves, and everything before.

Now billionaires build rockets fueled by all we bled,
To flee the wreckage that their greed accrued,
While we remain with all they left for dead—
The altar’s final offering: me and you.

Archipelagos of Creeds

15 Monday Dec 2025

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We built vast libraries of all we knew,
Named every star, each cell, each secret gene—
Then learned that every fact could fracture too,
Depending which paid mouthpiece owned the screen.

The square where once we gathered fell to weeds;
The common tongue grew foreign on each lip.
We sorted into archipelagos of creeds,
And watched the last shared ground beneath us slip.

The scholar shows the graph, the data bare;
The pundit laughs and paints it over: “Lies.”
Yet somewhere ice is calving, unaware
Of whether we’ll foresee our own demise.

We had the tools. We had the charts. We knew.
But knowledge split like light through fractured glass;
Truth became whatever felt most true,
And so we watched our only future pass.

The irony complete, the tragedy absurd:
We drowned in information, starved for fact,
A chorus who forgot a common word,
Together, yet too fractured still to act.

Elemental Requiem

14 Sunday Dec 2025

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The wind speaks low in syllables of grief,
And lightning splits the marrow of the sky.
I heard the storm confess beyond belief
That even gods grow weary, and must cry.

The fire knows no mercy, knows no name,
It dances on the bones of what we built.
We prayed to it; it answered us in flame,
A god that feasts on innocence and guilt.

The water holds the memory of rain,
Of every flood that never knelt to atone—
It carries what the living can’t contain:
The salt of all the tears we’ve ever known.

The earth is patient with its buried dead,
It takes the root, the coffin, and the seed,
And does not speak of what it will be fed—
It only opens, with a quiet need.

And I am made of all these ancient aches:
The breath, the burning, drowning, and decay.
I am the storm before the body breaks—
I come to collect what life could not repay.

When Winter Speaks Its Last

13 Saturday Dec 2025

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I spoke in frost across the windowpane,
As sacred text the morning light embraced,
And children touched the language none could name
Before the sun undid what I had traced.

I was the stillness after midnight falls,
The hush that made the sleeping farmhouse creak,
The silver breath on barns and chapel walls,
The only god to whom the pines would speak.

Rivers kept my secrets under glass,
Meadows wore the quilts I sewed from snow,
And deer moved soft as prayers before mass
To drink from wells that only winter knows.

But something in the cardinal’s cry foretold
The turning: ancient covenants were shorn.
I learned to lose, to shrink, to slowly fold
Myself into a longing, barely mourned.

The icicles grew thinner every noon,
My kingdom wept beneath the melting eaves,
The crows returned to mock the fading moon,
And one by one the frozen ponds took leave.

I tried to hold the shadow of a birch,
To keep one acre cradled in my arms,
But March came soft, a hymn released from church,
To bless the muddy roads and waking farms.

Now I am just a coldness in the shade,
A memory the oldest granite keeps,
A hush beneath the roots where oaths were laid,
The dream from which the sleeping orchard weeps.

Tell them I was not cruelty but rest,
That death is not the opposite of spring—
I held the world in silence at my breast
So it might wake with strength enough to sing.

Now let the thaw come soft. Now let me go.
My silence lives on, folded in the stones,
And when December whispers of first snow,
Listen close—you’ll hear it in your bones.

The Beacon and the Shoal

11 Thursday Dec 2025

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Upon a cliff where sea winds wail and sigh,
A lighthouse keeper fed his beacon’s flame,
He watched the vessels passing safely by,
And found his solemn purpose in their claim.

His daughter was his light within the tower,
With raven hair that danced upon the gale,
She filled his solitude with song each hour,
And helped him guide each homebound vessel’s sail.

One evening came a stranger to their door,
A sailor with a smile like morning sun,
He spoke of treasures from a foreign shore,
And swore her grandest days had just begun.

She begged her father’s heart to set her free,
But something in the stranger’s glance seemed wrong,
The keeper felt a darkness none could see,
Yet love is deaf to every warning song.

She fled into the storm, not looking back,
Upon the sailor’s ship she slipped away,
Her father stared until the world went black,
And prayed to see her face another day.

For seven years he kept his vigil still,
Through winter’s wrath and summer’s fleeting peace,
He nursed the light upon that lonely hill,
And searched in vain the endless‑troubled seas.

At last, too old to climb the winding stair,
He let the beacon die one final eve,
His hope extinguished in the ice-cold air,
Too tired to tend, too emptied out to grieve.

That night a vessel foundered in the rain,
He raised no hand—its fate no longer his.
At dawn the wreck lay strewn across the main,
A splintered hull, a silence, an abyss.

He searched the broken wreckage, blind with shame:
There his daughter lay, lips frozen on his name.

 

Author’s Note: “The Beacon and the Shoal” is written in tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, whose gothic narratives have haunted readers for nearly two centuries. The poem draws from several wellsprings of Poe’s craft: the atmospheric isolation of a solitary figure consumed by grief, reminiscent of “The Raven”; the doomed beloved whose loss drives the narrative, a theme Poe explored obsessively in poems like “Annabel Lee” and “Lenore”; and the inexorable movement toward catastrophe that defines tales like “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The formal structure, iambic pentameter in quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme, echoes Poe’s insistence on musicality and mathematical precision in verse. Most essentially, the poem attempts to capture what Poe called “the death of a beautiful woman” as “the most poetical topic in the world,” while centering the tragedy on the one who survives to discover her. The lighthouse keeper, like so many of Poe’s narrators, is both witness and unwitting architect of his own devastation. His vigil, his surrender, and his terrible discovery at dawn are offered in the spirit of a poet who understood that grief is not a moment but a haunting.

Ponderosa Requiem: How a Plague Species Unmakes a Forest

09 Tuesday Dec 2025

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Intro

The recent article “The American West’s most iconic tree is disappearing” chronicles the rapid decline of the ponderosa pine across the Western United States and serves as both case study and indictment. It lays bare how a species that shaped landscapes, cultures, and watersheds for centuries is being driven toward disappearance by a civilization so ravenously extractive and short-sighted that it treats living forests as fuel, scenery, or collateral damage rather than kin.

Its account of dying forests, shifting biomes, and irrevocable ecological thresholds forms the foundation for this essay’s exploration of what such a loss means for humanity, for other tree species, and for the integrity of the web of life itself. In tracing the unraveling of one iconic forest under the pressures of climate change, fire suppression, and relentless human expansion, the article exposes a deeper corruption in our species’ relationship with the Earth—a willingness to gamble away ancient, irreplaceable systems for fleeting profit and convenience. It thus opens a window onto the larger question of how much time remains for humans to walk a living, recognizable Earth before these accumulated acts of neglect and greed harden into a new, diminished planetary reality from which there is no return.

The fall of an ecological keystone

The ponderosa pine has structured the landscapes, cultures, and economies of the American Southwest for more than a millennium, yet in a few frantic decades a voracious, growth-addicted species—ours—has pushed it toward the brink. What once was building material, fuel, transportation infrastructure, and artistic and spiritual inspiration now doubles as a ledger of human arrogance, each stump and burn scar another entry in the account of a civilization that confuses liquidation with progress. Its forests have supported more than 200 animal species, shaded snowpacks, and regulated water flows that sustain rivers, aquifers, and human communities downstream, but these quiet services have never stood a chance against the deaf, extractive machinery of short-term profit and political cowardice.

Since 2000, more than 200 million ponderosa pines have died, and ecologists expect that more than 90% of Southwestern ponderosa forests could vanish within a few decades, while our institutions respond with the usual mixture of denial, greenwashed rhetoric, and incremental gestures. What is vanishing is not just a tree, but an entire living architecture, with many areas shifting to grass and shrublands for centuries to come as if handed over to a cheaper, degraded substitute landscape. This shift represents a permanent reorganization of climate and vegetation rather than a temporary disturbance, a reconfiguration brutally accelerated by human-made warming and mismanagement, marking what some scientists call the first unmistakable “post–climate-change landscape” in the United States—a phrase that barely captures the vandalism involved.

Web of life under stress

When a dominant tree species collapses, the effects cascade outward through the food web, but our species has shown a remarkable talent for pretending that such cascades are abstract, distant, or someone else’s problem. Habitat, nesting sites, and food sources vanish for birds, mammals, insects, and microbes that evolved alongside the ponderosa, while the human juggernaut that set this in motion lurches forward, congratulating itself on “resilience” and “adaptation” as if spin could replace lost worlds. Species closely tied to ponderosa forests—such as goshawks, white-headed woodpeckers, Mexican spotted owls, and tassel-eared squirrels—face local extirpation or severe decline as their home forests convert to open, hotter, more exposed terrain, a transformation engineered not by fate but by the calculated negligence of a culture that treats nonhuman life as expendable scenery.

Beyond wildlife, the loss of canopy accelerates snowmelt, reducing the reliability of water supplies in a region already facing more than three decades of drought, yet water policy remains captive to short-term interests, real estate speculation, and the fantasy that technology alone will spare us from consequence. Agriculture, cities, and Indigenous and rural communities absorb the shock while the systems that created it remain largely unchanged, their corruption normalized as “the way things are.” As these forests disappear, the emotional and spiritual well-being of people who have known them as places of beauty, refuge, and identity also erodes, leaving a “tree-shaped hole” in the human psyche—a wound deepened by the knowledge that this was not merely tragedy, but the predictable result of choices made in full awareness of the risks.

What this portends for other trees

The ponderosa’s decline exposes a grim pattern: even species once considered hardy—able to withstand heat, drought, insects, and fire—are crossing thresholds where past resilience no longer applies, because the rules themselves have been rewritten by a fossil-fueled, growth-obsessed civilization. This is not nature “failing” but humans systematically stripping resilience from the system and then feigning surprise when it finally snaps. Two forces drive this: a century of fire suppression that left unnaturally dense stands and massive fuel loads, and a warming, drying climate that pushes trees toward physiological limits and leaves them vulnerable to insects, disease, and extreme wildfires—each force a mirror held up to our chronic refusal to live within ecological boundaries.

This same “one-two punch” is already battering other emblematic trees of the West, including giant sequoias, which have suffered unprecedented mortality in recent megafires despite once being considered nearly indestructible. Even these ancient beings, which predate our empires and religions, now fall in great numbers because of choices made in boardrooms and legislative chambers more loyal to profit and political expediency than to any notion of stewardship. As heavy fuel loads collide with hotter, drier conditions, forests are increasingly replaced by shrublands and grasslands, and many sites fail to regenerate trees at all, suggesting that widespread biome shifts—not just temporary scars—are underway; and still, the dominant culture treats this as acceptable collateral damage in service of an economic system that devours its own life-support.

The unraveling of complex systems

The transformation of ponderosa forests is a local expression of a global pattern: climate-driven disturbances are pushing ecosystems past tipping points where self-repair gives way to structural collapse, while the societies responsible cling to the myth that minor tweaks and market incentives will suffice. Once forests lose their canopy and soils are exposed to intense heat and erosion, feedback loops—less shade, drier ground, more severe fire—lock new, simpler ecosystems in place, and humanity’s response so far has been to accelerate the very forces driving these loops, a kind of planetary self-sabotage masquerading as progress. In dismantling complexity for short-term gain, we are sawing through the branching systems that hold us aloft.

As more key species and habitats cross these thresholds, the planetary “web of life” becomes thinner and more fragile, but our political and economic structures remain almost pathologically incapable of acting at the scale and speed required. The redundancies that once absorbed shocks—diverse species, intact soils, old-growth refuges—are being stripped away, leaving a bare, vulnerable scaffolding on which billions of human lives still precariously depend. Food production, freshwater availability, disease regulation, and social stability all rest on the continued functioning of rich, diverse ecosystems, yet those in power behave as if these foundations are optional luxuries rather than the precondition for any civilization, let alone one as sprawling and demanding as ours.

How much time humanity has left

The disappearance of the ponderosa is not an immediate countdown to human extinction, but it is a clear, flashing signal that the window for maintaining a livable, familiar Earth is measured in decades, not centuries—a window our leaders seem determined to board up with lobbying money and false assurances. Current trajectories show that without rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and large-scale restoration of fire regimes and forest structure, more forests will follow similar paths, shrinking the climatic and ecological space in which complex societies can persist, while we continue to decorate collapse with euphemisms like “managed retreat” and “orderly transition.” Humanity’s great moral failure is not ignorance; it is knowing all of this and choosing, again and again, to protect entrenched power rather than the living systems that make any future possible.

Human beings as a species may endure far into the future—adaptable, clever, and stubborn—but the time left to walk an Earth recognizable to our ancestors, with stable seasons, enduring forests, reliable rivers, and intact webs of life, is rapidly closing, likely within the span of this century. What looms is not simply hardship but a profound diminishment, a narrowing of the world from cathedral forests and teeming rivers to managed remnants and engineered substitutes, all overseen by institutions that proved unwilling to restrain their own destructiveness. The fading of the ponderosa pine thus reads as a stark message carved into the bark of time: humanity still has a sliver of time to act, but not time to continue as it has, and every year of delay tightens the constraints, condemning future generations to inherit not a flourishing planet, but the scorched ledger of our corruption, greed, and willful myopia.

There is a brutal honesty in admitting that, judged solely by the biotic havoc it has unleashed, the human species now behaves less like a steward and more like a planetary plague. No other animal has so thoroughly converted living complexity into dead commodities, so casually poisoned its own water and air, or so relentlessly expanded its numbers and appetites while cloaking this rampage in the language of progress and entitlement. Our technologies magnify not wisdom but whim; our economies reward extraction and wastage; our politics elevate the shameless and the short-sighted, those most skilled at denying limits and externalizing harm. Strip away the stories of human exceptionalism and what remains is a woefully self-absorbed, dangerously clever primate that has set the biosphere on fire for the sake of comfort and status, then demanded applause for its ingenuity. In the long view of deep time, Earth has repeatedly recovered from cataclysms, rebuilding richness and balance after meteors and mass extinctions; it will do so again if given respite. What is not at all clear is whether this recovery can occur with an unrestrained human presence still gnawing at the foundations of climate, soil, water, and life itself—and there is every reason to think that a future without us, or with far fewer of us, would be kinder to almost every other living thing.

References:

Allen, Craig D., Daniel D. Breshears, and Neil G. McDowell. “On Underestimation of Global Vulnerability to Tree Mortality and Forest Die-Off from Hotter Drought in the Anthropocene.” Ecosphere 6, no. 8 (2015): 1–55. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES15-00203.1

Covington, W. Wallace, and Margaret M. Moore. “Southwestern Ponderosa Forest Structure: Changes since Euro-American Settlement.” Journal of Forestry 92, no. 1 (1994): 39–47. https://academic.oup.com/jof/article/92/1/39/4635874

Dirzo, Rodolfo, Hillary S. Young, Mauro Galetti, Gerardo Ceballos, Nick J. B. Isaac, and Ben Collen. “Defaunation in the Anthropocene.” Science 345, no. 6195 (2014): 401–406. https://sciences.ucf.edu/biology/d4lab/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2017/08/Dirzo-etal-2014.pdf.

Ferguson, Gary. “The American West’s Most Iconic Tree Is Disappearing.” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2025. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-12-02/southwest-ponderosa-pine-disappearing.

Ferguson, Gary. “The American West’s Most Iconic Tree Is Disappearing.” Phys.org, December 9, 2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-american-west-iconic-tree.html

McDowell, Nate, William T. Pockman, Craig D. Allen, David D. Breshears, Neil Cobb, Thomas Kolb, Jennifer Plaut, John Sperry, Adam West, David G. Williams, and Enrico A. Yepez. “Mechanisms of Plant Survival and Mortality during Drought: Why Do Some Plants Survive While Others Succumb to Drought?” New Phytologist 178, no. 4 (2008): 719–739. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18422905/.

Millar, Constance I., Nathan L. Stephenson, and Scott L. Stephens. “Climate Change and Forests of the Future: Managing in the Face of Uncertainty.” Ecological Applications 17, no. 8 (2007): 2145–2151. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/06-1715.1

North, Malcolm P., Brandon M. Collins, and Scott L. Stephens. “Using Fire to Increase the Scale, Benefits, and Future Maintenance of Fuels Treatments.” Journal of Forestry 110, no. 7 (October 2012): 392–401. https://academic.oup.com/jof/article/110/7/392/4599535.​

Raffa, Kenneth F., Brian H. Aukema, Barbara J. Bentz, Allan L. Carroll, Jeffrey A. Hicke, Monica G. Turner, and William H. Romme. “Cross-Scale Drivers of Natural Disturbances Prone to Anthropogenic Amplification: The Dynamics of Bark Beetle Eruptions.” BioScience 58, no. 6 (June 2008): 501–517. https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/58/6/501/235938.

Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. “Some Ponderosa Pine Forests Naturally Regenerate after Wildfire Management Treatment.” News article, March 13, 2025. https://www.swcasc.arizona.edu/news/some-ponderosa-pine-forests-naturally-regenerate-after-wildfire-management-treatment

Stephens, Scott L., Brandon M. Collins, Eric Biber, and Peter Z. Fulé. “US Federal Fire and Forest Policy: Emphasizing Resilience in Dry Forests.” Ecosphere 7, no. 11 (2016): e01584. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.1584

U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Adaptation Science Centers. “Wildfire Management Balances Wildfire Prevention and Ponderosa Pine Regrowth.” News release, May 29, 2025. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-centers/news/wildfire-management-balances-wildfire-prevention

The Kingdom of Endless Light

08 Monday Dec 2025

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In a kingdom where the sun could never set,
Where shadows lingered only in tales elders told,
The people dwelled in brilliance, free of regret—
Their towers glimmered, wrought of glass and gold.

A princess dwelt within those crystal walls,
Her name was Eve, the jewel of all the land.
She wandered through those ever-brightened halls
And wondered why no darkness kissed her hand.

“What is this night of which the ancients speak?”
She asked her father on his glittering throne.
He laughed, “A curse that made our forebears weak—
We broke its power. It is our light alone.”

But Eve grew weary of the endless glare,
Which left the roses bleached to pallid bone,
And left her people hollow, fixed in vacant stare,
Their eyes like mirrors—bright, yet not their own.

One eve—though eve meant nothing in that place—
She found a door half-hidden from the light,
And through it glimpsed a strange, forbidden space:
A garden where the moonflowers drank the night.

There fireflies pulsed like lanterns, soft and pale,
While crickets wove their hymns into nocturnal air.
The breathing night retold a quieter tale,
And silence held the garden’s wordless prayer.

An ancient woman sat beneath their bloom,
Her silver hair like cobwebs, soft and thin.
“You’ve found it, child—the kingdom’s secret room,
The place where we once let the darkness in.

“I was the one who’d hidden seeds of night,
Who’d smuggled shadow through the sun’s long reign.
They stripped my name, my standing, and my sight
For loving what the kingdom called profane.

“They banished night in root and branch and stem,
To never fear what shadows might betray;
But look at them—each one a captive gem—
None can truly dream, for night was slain that day.”

The princess wept for all her people lost—
The stars, the peace, the mercy of the dark,
The tender rest, the unacknowledged cost
Of keeping bright their one artificial spark.

She made her choice beneath those lunar flowers,
And broke the ancient spell that bound the sun.
Sweet darkness fell across the gilded towers,
And Eve, at last, was finally undone.

She fell the way a candle finds its end—
Not snuffed, but surrendered gently to the cold,
The night wrapped close around her like a friend,
And cradled what the sun could never hold.

They found her still where silver petals fell,
The first to sleep in seven hundred years.
The people howled against the broken spell
And clawed for fire through their streaming tears.

They burned the moonflower garden to the ground,
They burned the libraries and ancient lore,
They burned the forests till no shade was found,
And when that wasn’t bright enough, burned even more.

And still they desperately burn their world today,
And teach their children darkness is a sin.
They never learned the girl they cast away
Was trying to let something precious in.

The Overladen Ark

06 Saturday Dec 2025

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We built our kingdoms stone by stone,
And called the wilderness our right,
The ark we inherited, outmoded,
Now listing in the failing light.

The rivers bent to serve our thirst,
We drained the aquifers of old,
The watersheds we cracked, imploded,
Their breaking points long since foretold.

We burned the carbon, black and deep,
That Earth had buried long ago,
The atmosphere now overloaded,
While glaciers bled their blue below.

The coral bleached to bone-white graves,
The monarch lost its meadow trail,
The seas grown acidic, shells corroded,
Swallowed islands, to no avail.

Our children learned to count the cost
Of summers grown too fierce to bear,
Their futures thinning and eroded,
Each breath a bargain with the air.

We fed the machine and fed it more,
Ten billion mouths on one strained sphere,
The growth we worshipped, unchecked, exploded,
While we pretended we could not hear.

The irony will not be missed
By whatever crawls from ash and brine:
The cleverest ape, now gorged and bloated,
One hand still reaching for the wine.

And so we feast on borrowed time,
The stewards starving at their spread,
Each bitter truth still sugarcoated—
We clawed for scraps till hope had fled,
And gnawed upon each other’s bones instead.

The Geometry of Distance

05 Friday Dec 2025

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I charted you through all the autumn years,
A pattern drawn beyond my mortal hand,
And named each trembling light through salted tears—
Too far for fragile hearts to understand.

They told me constellations never change,
That ancient stars hold steady in their place,
But you kept drifting, beautiful and strange—
A geometry no soul could hope to trace.

I built my telescope of want and wire,
Kept vigil through each sleepless, starlit night,
Convinced that if I focused my desire,
I’d draw you close enough to feel your light.

But distances are hungry, silent things
That swallow words before they reach the ear,
And time clips even the most faithful wings
Until what’s far becomes what once was near.

The astronomers would say you’re long since dead,
That what I love is but a ghost of flame,
The echo of a burning thing that bled
Its last breath to the dark before I came.

And still I mapped you, gave your angles form,
Drew lines between your silence and your fire,
Found order in each elemental storm,
And gleaned frail meaning from a vanished desire.

My neighbors thought me holy or insane,
This man who charted heavens on his wall,
Who swore he felt your heat like desert flame,
Though you were never there to shine at all.

Tonight I caught my reflection in the glass—
A constellation of its own design:
These age-flecked spots like stars, the veins that pass
As nebulae through flesh long past its prime.

Perhaps you were the one who charted me—
Who watched this mortal flicker, burn, and fade,
Who traced my slow extinction patiently,
And I, mere stardust: sentient, afraid.