Broken Leaves - April version

Someday, I will be content with this piece. Not yet though.

Pulled by a black magic so
ephermal it’s more mist than mass,
I conjure.
I conjure and summon the thunder the clouds, spinning
celestial hammers that make ruin of the land –
Sent forward to hew the stone,
to destroy to butcher to carve apart the image of
the hand that came before,
and make anew a likeness never before seen:
But my vision is hollow, empty, a fraction of yesterday,
missing a critical support mechanism
that remains as intangible as the lightning
that carved these lines known prior,
and the hand that ordained this world.

The struggle sometimes is not one of definition,
no, but rather syntax; but the cracks, holes, gaps
I failed to foresee, could not have seen,
they mar and line this landscape -
They define it, they claim themselves as
antagonia-in-opposition.
They embolden the horizon with a faultline that
I knew not these iron hands capable:
An awareness of futility so pervasive so as
to destroy in an eternity of decay.
But not the stone
- never the stone -
As even barring I or he who came before I,
These stones live of their own:
Grow and fall and form, and I – we –
elements of impermanence, and yet as strongly
as these molecules bind themselves my image,
as absolutely as they assume correct form,
they are to be only as dust, as laughably marred as crippled,
their pre-programmed entropy a display that I – we – have neither
those iron-shod hands nor power over stone, no, but rather -
The shattered leaf, the burned branch,
The wilted, scorched and dying grass, yes
- these things,
these things dead and fleeting and soon gone, yes –
These are the ways in which we carve.