Hope you’re doing fine, @d-pend.

This poem strongly caught my attention. What a soulless drill can we make out of life. In the world of this poem, we have become the antagonists of nature:

With enough repetition
they etch initials in treerings:
with voices alone
become the scalpels of pharisees.

It is such a strong image. Our egocentric invasiveness engraved in the eternal pulp of trees. The image of a gentle cow being branded came to my mind immediately.

Those “blazing blanks”, “those crimson numerals tattooed on temples” may be, sadly, indeed the only trace we are supposed to leave behind us, the deceitful appearance of color: meaninglessness.

The third stanza took me to the second picture. The scene makes me shiver with a cold and metallic tremor in the spine. It’d be a good image of hell (one where you feel cold), a place of automatons, ignoring the thriving green of the climbers.

Looming is a powerful image, for everything is intertwined in the universe. The second stanza takes me directly to the last picture, where you work out this image to allude to interconnectivity, like a myriad of lanes at a multitude of crossroads: the fabric of life. Intense.

Your voice, superb! ♥ Thanks for writing amazing pieces ☻