Survivors

Opening the window a chink, she could see

Even as her nails bore into the rotting, termite-infested wood,

Robins, nightingales, quails chorusing on every second tree,

As she basked in the satisfaction of doing as she believed she should.

As she breathed in the petrichor, the incredible essence,

Her mind laboured through a journey of bittersweet reminiscence.

A young, wide-eyed, orphaned girl of nineteen,

She'd settled with her septuagenarian husband in this deserted clearing.

She'd spend her days in dread, chewing the innards of her mouth to bits,

As the night brought her unspeakable horrors, courtesy of her husband's drunken fits.

Thus she spent her days, apprehensive of the future, reproachful of the past.

Until one day, her husband breathed his last.

It was on her way back from the burning grounds

That she looked down at the seed of bristlecone pine in her palm,

That she'd instinctively rescued from the wood on the burning pyre.

She felt a kinship towards it, as though like herself, its need for companionship was dire. 

Every ounce of self preservation had been wrenched out of her.

She was holding on to life by the feeble, ravaged skin of her teeth.

And yet, she felt this inexplicable desire

That the pine seed should learn to live, to breathe. 

Emptying a tiny jar of her late husband's gambling receipts,

She planted the seed in it, placing it next to the parthenium weeds. 

She watered it, nurtured it, like the child she'd never had.

It enveloped her in a mantle of warmth on days happy and sad. 

On a stormy night, even as the world faced Zeus's malevolent rage

She'd feel like a pair of wings fluttering against the bars of a cage. 

Her face a miniature mountainous terrain

Twin streams from her eyes converging in an estuary above her lips

She'd look out into the incessant, rather vengeful rain

And see the sapling brave the storm, as water flowed from its leaves in drips. 

They were both survivors in their own inimitable ways,

Standing tall, invincible in the dark night, even as the moon changed phase.

Today, she stood in her doorway,

Looking at the forest of coniferous trees she'd created.

She hugged her pine tree, commemorating its fiftieth birthday,

Thanking it for for being her impenetrable Aegis until every storm abated. 

In the half-century that had passed,

Her wounds had faded,

The black clots of congealed blood on her face had lightened

Leaving only scars she'd never bothered to hide

Under long sleeves, or collars high

Or beneath an intricately woven lie. 

She'd let no woodcutter wield his axe on her cherished tree.

She'd lived off the land, and the land had finally set her free.