Competition Twenty-Three Highly Commended: Dule Tree by Caroline Mckenzie
September 11, 2024
Here I stood, paltry at first then leggy and reaching. Others came and went and still I stood. The earth was dust, and I was dry. I scoured my ringed reserves and absorbed the meagre goodness found there.
The moraine changed and the ground grew wetter. Those like me came and stayed although none were so mighty. I grew wide and blanketed in thick, ruckled skin. Varmints lived on me and lichen, millipedes and birds.
As I grew into middle age, some eighty years old, they used me to hang the wicked. I soaked up their black-hearted deeds but did not absolve the acts. They had not the capacity to see the wrong. There was no enlightenment.
I bear the weight of the dead; both the rotten and the maligned. Their souls live inside me and frighten the little birds. They are smoke in my lungs, blackening my fresh green cells.
Now I am a grand old giant. It would take many men to fell me. I could stand for another century. I have flowers and fruit in abundance. It falls and where it lays shoots come up and die away again, thwarted by my need to syphon all the sustenance from the land.
Someone was buried beneath me once. When their body mouldered away, I ate up the nourishment and was stronger than ever before. That soul lives outside of me but within the tracery of my vast canopy; present but remote.
They say if you remove a ring of bark from the outside of a tree, all the way around, it will perish. I have wished for this merciful passing. Instead, I shall fade away, ceasing to take nutrition until I am desiccated and brittle. I have given, taken, and watched and I wish to see no more.
Caroline lives in North East England with two elderly greyhounds. She recently began writing with intent having dallied for many years. Her work has appeared in The People’s Friend Magazine.
Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash
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