Lonely daffodils and unbloomed tulips
enduring the frost without complaint.
Bare trees—they seem as if they want to speak
but have, for some reason, stopped themselves,
or been stopped. Muted, silenced, censored.
Or are they speaking to someone else?
Is their message beyond range of my wind-bitten ears,
pitched to the wrong frequency or current,
the wrong chronology or horizon?
Perhaps the trees are talking all the time,
their words evolving over years and decades,
their budding flowers are a message for the bees,
a profuse and ripening script for the clouds,
and leaves are a message, the forest is singing
a collective song that lasts a millennium,
the Earth composes a single sentence
that will unspool until its final hour,
stars, the galaxies, cosmological syntax—.