![]() Look, what a rare and beautiful cloud, so soft and white. Is it a Namib Desert beetle? Ahh, no, far too large. My pondering is interrupted by movement working its way up our ridge. It would seem the remains of our would-be forest have only survived to the south, or like me, in higher elevation. To the north, as I gaze towards the equator, I can no longer make out the silhouettes of my uncles I once could fifty years ago. Our kin in the valley below passed long before reaching maturity. Those of us who have made it through the harshening climate of our home are all near the top of this ridge. What is left of our generation is but a scattering, a mere shadow of the promised forest we were supposed to be. Without enough nourishment to share, many of my siblings have died of thirst and heat. Our mothers whispered to us how we were the plentiful generation, how we would grow into the rare quiver forest, existing only in the ancestral reminiscing of our fathers.īut slowly the wind stopped carrying their whispers, and gradually his moisture and coolness disappeared alongside them. There were dozens of us saplings reaching for the sky as we hoped to one day grow as strong and thick as our elders. When I had just sprouted from the gritty soil, I was told I had a hundred brothers and sisters. I have long since given up my childhood dream of abiding in a dense quiver tree forest. ![]() Perhaps it is time for me to accept my passing into adulthood. Now it takes me a decade to make much progress at all. In those times I grew quickly, my trunk expanding with each passing year. I could still taste the salt residue in the water, having been brought over so recently from the Atlantic. When I was but a young aloe, a sapling of a thing, (3) I remember absorbing the plentiful dew into my roots. Now the wind brings me little more than movement and company I wish I would’ve appreciated his providence when the days were cooler and the sun showed mercy. Years ago the wind would bring me moisture daily, an amount undetectable to most, but abundant enough for me and the grasses to share. The breeze blows between the grazzes and boulders scattered near my base, and I sense little precipitation in his path. Silhouettes Among StarsĪs the single ray of sunlight turns to many, the shadows retreat one by one, escaping with the stars into the cover of bright blue sky. Each peel separates away from my core a thousandth of an inch more. My dying bark cells warm one hundredth of a degree. As the smallest crescent of the golden sphere breaks the earth’s flat darkness in the distance, a single beam of light crosses a thousand miles of desert bushland to impact the face of my trunk, illuminating the bark in a bright tan-yellow, save highlighting the cracked edges in shadow-blue. Everything for me happens in minute differences, and slowly for that matter. It is morning, and the sun rises a degree on the horizon from where it rose yesterday. For I am only 127 years of age many of my kin have grown to over 300. Sometimes I mourn the loss of a (bark) flake peeled off by wind and time, but then I remember this is only a sign of me growing, and I fathom at how large I have become, and how I grow larger still. Just a hue off from the color of sand, sometimes in low light I wouldn’t be able to tell where my body meets the sand save the differentiating texture of my bark and the occasional shifting of the sandy soil. Soft swirls of sand flutter up against my trunk. Three Rubrics: P unctuation, W ord Choice, C oncisenessĪ soft arid wind brushes the cracklings of my peeling bark.
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