Sonnet Youth #1 - In the Endless Wood

And in the endless wood there came the sound of snow fallen, fallen to tuck in for winter the pine-needled ridge-lined forest of hills that sleeps behind my home. In this wood I passed a stranger, a fortress of cloth, woolen and scarved, starving to trek the path.

These hills, this land once belonged to the Powhatan tribes. And before that, the Chesapians, he said. Snow collected on the flannel brim of a worn cap, auburn and gray. I looked around as he spoke. Pine and birch stood kings and queens, the forest a chessboard. Tangled vines, dead and decayed, thistled the bushes of squat, sand-rooted plants. The snow fell silent, dampening the roar of nature's solace.

Before that, this land was very different. He said, You stand on the shore of a sea long since receded; recursive before its own waters. The sand beneath you is all that remains of the coast and the fossils of fish feed the trees, permitting their growth in the mineral desert. What strangled the waters from this beach, ancient and primordial, is the very snow matter that falls to your brow. As this land came to know cold, it soon forgot the fluid borders of its aqueous neighbor, the mighty Atlantic. Deep blue, crested in white, cold and stirring, the Atlantic dried itself from these shores, uncovering the reef bed of pine and birch. The warmth of life grew cold and din, heeding the mechanization of forest and home. The natives arrived.

Perhaps 'twas Marxian redistribution; other shores need seas. I chuckled before my snark. A sea of shadow cast the coast to cold and other shores sought other seas, I continued, recursive, recursive again. Besides, the histories of time long lost are of concern to us no longer. The primordial freeze that choked the shores keeps my home on its foundation; no need for floating cities on the water world. Our civilization is built on that freeze. On the snow that falls. The ground that ices binds the roots in this region where the Powhatan slaughtered the Chesapians in their sleep!

My mouth steamed, my fingers numbed, and I knew the setting sun sought further to blanket the forest in snow, dust, and cold.

Soon, he started, the return to warmth will end the so-thought eternal abomination that humanly plagues the earth with their humanly plagues. Recursion, recursion! Life on this rock is not natural, as it is not natural throughout the universe. Soon, the return comes. This precipitation precipitates civilization's decline, precipitously! Recursion, recursion!

The stranger vanished.

Perhaps he thought himself impeding the fallen snow that blanketed the forest eternal in directions all. Perhaps he himself an apparition was, a spirit or whatever, sent by the Earth to warn of demise and nature, a course for the unnatural, and a prediction based upon the past. A quiet calm returned. Once again in the endless wood there came the sound of snow fallen.


J. Moulton