The Ancient Witness
Oh, Grandfather's mulberry, celestial spectre of time,
How many eons have you stood sentinel?
Your colossal trunk, hollowed by millennia,
Yet defiant, sprouting life anew.
Sacred shade for medieval hand-mills,
Guardian of the hallowed stone,
Where our Lord's mortal shell was cleansed,
De quel âge es-tu, timeless one?
Countless seasons you've borne our burdens,
Echoes of anguish and maternal lullabies,
Cradling the sickly in your boughs.
You endured our thoughtless cruelty,
Our shrill cries piercing your unripe fruit,
Discordant with nature's symphony.
We hung death's implements from your limbs,
Bound rough halters to your ancient flesh.
Beneath your canopy, a thousand sacrifices,
Blood-soaked earth and seared flesh,
Kidneys and testicles offered to the flames,
While we howled, "De quel âge es-tu, lord?"
Yet you whispered, "Whatsoever, dears,"
Until Zeus' fury split your core,
Sprawled like primordial female prophet,
Earth's womb exposed between your roots.
Thighs open to the sky,
Having the Ditch of Earth
Thus we understood the motherland's violation,
Ravaged by steel and venomous tongues.
My brother wept upon your fallen form,
"De quel âge es-tu, Lord?"
Now your leaves wither, time's decree,
No longer matched to your life-giving core.
The worst of times loom on the horizon,
Your agony dwarfs our petty wounds.
Dear father, dear Lord of the domicile,
"De quel âge es-tu?" we ask in vain.
Though unworthy stewards of your realm,
We loved you as mortals love the divine.
In your demise, we face our own mortality,
The ecosystem's judgment on our species.
Your silent wisdom echoes through ages,
A testament to nature's enduring grace
From the Old House
(De quel Age es-tu, Lord?)
Oh, Grandfather’s mulberry,
Spectral colossus, cathedral of time,
How many aeons have you endured, unbowed,
Your lignified sinews entombed in the strata of forgotten epochs?
Are you older than God’s first utterance,
Or but a vestige of the first tremor of universe ?
Your prodigious trunk hollows—
A cathedral of decay, yet sovereign,
A hushed reliquary where centuries kneel in silent veneration.
Yet you defy entropy's act,
Sprouting emerald tendrils against the decrepitude of time.
You eclipsed the medieval querns,
Cast your penumbral dominion upon the cyclopean boundary stone,
Upon which was once purified
The corporeal effigy of the Lord,
His flesh sanctified beneath a moribund firmament.
De quel Age es-tu, Lord?
You bore the dirge of millennia,
The ululations of the bereaved, the supplications of the damned.
You were the sacred scaffold of infancy,
Cradling the fever-ridden neonate in pendulous slings
Woven from the cosmic filaments of extinguished constellations.
Yet we, crude hominids of ephemeral tenure,
Defiled your sentient timber.
We exsanguinated your vitality,
Our parasitic digits rending your unseasoned fruit,
Unraveling the acoustic harmonics of the avian liturgy.
And worse—
We asphyxiated your limbs with manacles of hemp,
Tethered the bovine progeny of our agrarian toil to your riven wrists,
And beneath your umbrage,
A myriad of ruminants were eviscerated,
Their viscera sundered by ferrous implements
Forged in the crucibles of supernovae.
Their entrails blackened in sacrificial conflagrations,
While we, delirious with bloodlust, shrieked,
“De quel Age es-tu, Lord?”
Yet even as we blasphemed against your sanctity,
You murmured, “Whatsoever, dears.”
Again and again,
Until the fulminations of the empyrean rent your core.
Celestial conflagration immolated your arboreal integument,
Splitting you asunder,
And you collapsed, vast and unfathomable,
Like an oracle undone,
Thighs agape to the void sky,
The abyss yawning betwixt your sundered loins,
A cosmic crevasse birthing entropy itself.
And then—only then—we understood.
How the primordial womb of the motherland lay desecrated,
Ravaged by the bayonets of entropy,
By the obsidian tongues of false prophets,
By the lances of collapsing chronologies.
And my brother, prostrate before your ruined husk,
Wept tears so incendiary,
They scorched the fabric of time.
He keened over your sepulchral carcass,
“De quel Age es-tu, Lord?”
You know your hour has tolled.
The leaves atrophy, spectral vestiges of an era expired.
The celestial cartography that once mirrored your rootwork
Now blisters at the periphery of oblivion.
You know your hour has tolled—
And with it, the epoch of men corrodes into obsolescence.
I perceive your immeasurable agony,
A sorrow so gravitational it warps the luminance of perishing stars.
I am ashamed to unveil my paltry lacerations,
For they are but ephemeral abrasions
On the epidermis of eternity.
Dear chthonic patriarch, arbiter of the ancients,
The ensouled edifice of the house, the revenant of the land,
“De quel Age es-tu, Lord?”
Though we were but degenerate symbionts in your domain,
Though we failed even as worshippers at your roots,
We bore you in our marrow,
Etched in the annals of our primordial lineage.
And though we betrayed you,
We grieve you as men mourn forsaken deities—
With trembling tongues
And requiems devoured by the wind
