Out of Commission
The Willow up a-bothersome climb from the town,
barely visible, from the common ground;
tucked away in secrecy and solitude
where ‘blissful snow’ is shed;
and away from the town instead,
where only fools and lunatics care to tread.
And everyone else's given up on the dream:
To come back alive from the trek to that tree.
With their lives in hands of their counterparts,
it's only reasonable;
no one would trust the other
for the approval of an old-tradition after all.
But the lunatics immune to all the wisdom,
feared not of a single step.
They sought to see this tree for the myth it held.
A Willow that talked, perhaps it was the wind,
or the snow; or the ‘fallen wolven kids’.
On the way to the Willow were stairs etched in frozen-flesh,
amid the cutting arid wind.
The Lunatics’ face, half bitten by frost, had grown blisters on the cheeks;
every sweeping wind would resurface the cuts, bleeding thin.
A few more bricks were laid,
the pack disappeared along the way.
The sole-leader, earlier hesitant, looked back.
His eyes flashed by a blur of blinding-grey,
and in the drone of the cutting-wind
he’d come to believe:
for him to walk any further,
his angst had come to trade with courage
his vision, as it grew dim.
"Was it a mirage? The talking Willow, the wind, the snow, or the fallen wolven kids?"
For it was a curse of the hill, the arid wind, or the Willow's resistance, to forego
being seen by ‘the sick!’
He wouldn't ever know.
One way, up the hill was all the way he could go.
He shouted for his comrade to follow his pace.
He was awfully keen to walk to his grave.
When atlast ‘a final invisible veil’ was crossed,
the steps grew flat, remained an un-walked layer of snow,
he’d made it to the Willow.
He walked closer, fell on his back,
the Willow took him in its lap, for what little empathy it had.
He gazed above into the tree’s embrace,
the sins of the town sparkled as beads within leaves.
Even at the unmanned-height, he’d been in the same town, as he'd always been.
But he wouldn't know; he was blissfully blind,
one eye out-of-commission.
The knees had given in, limbs grew numb,
the body had resigned,
left-to-abandon his miserable life, bleak-ambition, and fargone-vision.
All he could now was feel the snow
as it made way unto his face from the Willow's wings.
"Willow weep for me" he said.
The Lunatics had been under scrutiny from scholars, and crowd alike,
an age-old human trait built on ancestral pride.
However ostracised they may’ve been,
even the lunatics refused to die without at least a single cry.
Then, a cover was cast upon him, his vision indistinct.
It felt to him as if the Willow had shed tears on his face,
akin to molten wax upon his frozen-skin.
Next, a warmth enveloped his hand,
growing in weight, spreading up to his neck,
accompanied by whimpers lathed with lunatic-silence,
in which he fitted very well.
Now, he rests under the Willow watching over the town;
in winter, as wind, as snow, or amongst the wolven kids that fell.
The saner of the two had trekked down soon after his death,
leaving the town, rumoured to have wished upon its damnation.
Said to have headed for the lower plains,
with a resolve to write about lunatic injustice and humility,
and everything of the same.
The rumours were never confirmed.
No one could find, or confront the other lunatic.
No one ever trekked again
the peak sub-human people claimed.