Odd Line Lyrical Writings

Merk was not an daffodil, alone in a field of sunflowers. Each year Merk would rise out of the ground first and educate the new harvest of annuals.

Merk was tall for a daffodil, standing several feet taller than the sunflowers for most of the year. Merk always though sunflowers where wise, as they always looked up for advice. So Merk had always looked down at them, telling them stories about how he survived so long in the sunflower field, being a daffodil and all. Of course none of the sunflowers were listening to Merk, since the first dawn they had all been fasciated at the sun that shined behind him in the morning.

But Merk though it was just typical of youths that their attention waned in the afternoon. They had always for several year been far more attentive to him in the morning. So dutifully he continued to tell them about the life cycle of their kin and how the weather would soon turn cold. But every day they would look right at him in the morning as the sun rose and every evening they would grow tired of his lectures.

All throughout the summer, Sunflowers passed their lives in the manner, and when Merk started to wilt of old age ready to close up for another year the sunflowers where almost his height. He could hear them whisper of the golden circle that they so inspired to be with radiant foliage. This made Merk very happy to hear as he closed up for another year.

After Merk had retired for another year the sunflowers continued to grow and towered above his hibernating ground. Once and a while at night they would look down at where he slumbered…

“Odd fellow thinking he was the sun.” whispered one to the others.

“True, but I liked his point of view.” they all replied.

It is only a pit in the ground, surrounded by the rough edges of jaggedly-cut stone. It was once the earth, true and whole where plants used to grow. I walk into this pit, this mine, and I look at how the sky has claimed it as its own. Towering into the earth it has claimed it’s space; the earth works too slowly to reclaim what is lost.

I touch the ground which is filled with pebbling shards, crushed beneath the machinery that stole its brethren. It is cold and moist from the water trapped by the cavern, falling to the broken ground unable to escape once captured. 

There are few animals, and birds stay mainly on the edge shelfs, ever leerily the the earth may one day reclaim what they now call home. A few flutter of wings and they leave me alone, a solo figure in the emptiness below.

I’ve seen it all in minutes, there is not much to see. The air makes for poor imagery being nothing but vapour; the wall nothing but scars. I climb out of the pit, on the same trail that I entered. Never looking back as the sun is beginning to fall. Night captures day, like the sky captures earth. Each never ending but slow at first.