Shadows trickle in the forest,
tiny hurricanes of light and darkness,
Solar systems beneath branches,
flickering throughout the rustling underbrush.

A soft tendril slowly uncoils upwards,
chasing the fleeting warmth escaping it,
taunting it to reach higher.
How sad is the fate of such fragile efforts!
Don’t you know the world is doomed?
The universe fated to cool,
to freeze all in immeasurable silence.

Why, then, should this small, green string
insist on rising from the earth?
When everything that lives is merely
gifted a moment to know its place
before being banished back to the oblivion that birthed it.
Why would a tree want to touch the sky?
Why does a flower unveil its glorious petals?
What is the point of struggling for a few mere hours of radiance?
Of suffering for a height that disappears as you climb it?

When the penultimate truth of all that exists, is to die,
enslaved to the entropic genetic code of our inheritance.
What is the purpose of such sad beauty?
What meaning is embedded in the sun’s brilliance?
That the inevitable ruin might not touch us for an instant,
That life should persist in the brief time it has to be.
That we might love the stars despite the encroaching darkness.

When all eternity eventually succumbs to the Void,
The only reason that remains at the end of everything,
was for a single day when we could feel the hope of light.