A skeletal tree
scratches the icicle air.
Its limbs ache
and strain to feel
what was once
a brush of leaf on leaf
where now it is nothing
on nothing.

The skeletal tree
reaching to heaven,
shivering in the icicle air.
Surely there is something
(so very far away)
to return those that
protected it
and kept it whole.

I drop my jacket
and brace myself
against the icicle air.
The skeletal tree
looks so lonely here
that I may just become
a skeleton below it,
entwined in its roots
and eaten away,
pulled down nearer the grave
that God couldn't correct.