Treewind and Storm

TREEWIND AND STORM

I walked one night,
far from day walls,
onto the top
of a street-scarred hill.

Under me dwindled
lines of dead lights:
silence of still
fragments of city,
quietened by darkness.

But the wind
raged all around,
like celebration of life's source.

Fresh on my face,
tingling my skin,
it swayed the dark, bare trees,
endowing their thin branches
with strange and living gestures;
it shook the roadside bushes,
endowing their thin leaves
with a million, whispering voices;
an distant thunder gave the very sky
deep tones of muttering discourse.

And the cloud-sullened vastness
gleamed with storm joy.

I felt my limbs
strong like the treewind.
I felt my heart
sing with the skywind.

I felt my blood
pulse with storm power;
my being bound to boundlessness.

But beneath slunk sadlit streets
where time was passed in dullness;
where we live like ghosts,
hidden from night,
in trance to the spell of the talking,
hypnotic screen's pale light.