Senlin, A Biography: Part 01: His Dark Origins - 02

Senlin, walking beside us, swings his arms     And turns his head to look at walls and trees.     The wind comes whistling from shrill stars of winter,     The lights are jewels, black roots freeze.     Did I, then, stretch from the bitter earth like these,     Reaching upward with slow and rigid pain     To seek, in another air, myself again?     (Immense and solitary in a desert of rocks     Behold a bewildered oak     With white clouds screaming through its leafy brain.)     Or was I the single ant, or tinier thing,     That crept from the rocks of buried time     And dedicated its holy life to climb     From atom to beetling atom, jagged grain to grain,     Patiently out of the darkness we call sleep     Into a hollow gigantic world of light     Thinking the sky to be its destined shell,     Hoping to fit it well!     The city dissolves about us, and its walls     Are mountains of rock cruelly carved by wind.     Sand streams down their wasting sides, sand     Mounts upward slowly about them: foot and hand     We crawl and bleed among them! Is this Senlin?     In the desert of Senlin must we live and die?     We hear the decay of rocks, the crash of boulders,     Snarling of sand on sand. Senlin! we cry.     Senlin! again . . . Our shadows revolve in silence     Under the soulless brilliance of blue sky.     Yet we would say: there are no rocks at all,     Nor desert of sand . . . here by a city wall     White lights jewell the evening, black roots freeze,     And Senlin turns his head to look at trees.