Beginings and Ends

Quiet and calm
Leaves swaying in the breeze
A distant melody
Slowly, ever so slowly there is a faint stirring
Nothing is visible at first, nothing is seen
But then a scent of something sweet is sensed
Something slightly pungent yet strangely delicate
It is not readily identifiable
Perhaps an apple, over-ripe, just past its prime
Orange pekoe, maybe?
Organic mulch?
It’s hard to say
Musk?
A rustle of leaves
A hint of a whirlwind sends them into swirl
A tiny animal burrows out of its hole and peeks
Green, green, moist and grassy green
Mud
Earthy mud
Clay, dark and oozy
Cold, cold clay
Green, moist, grassy clay
A touch of musk and orange mud
A furry head shakes it’s beady eyes and then darts back underground again
A ray of amber light filters through the branches of a nearby tree
The sky above is softly softly blue with powder-puff clouds
cartooning into happy shapes of round.
A child of golden brown sits on the grassy slope
He leans over, lithely touches his foot
fingers his toes and laughs with glee.
The laughter rumbles though him like gently rolling jelly in a crimson sea
A tiny insect, no bigger than a speck of ink from a faulty fountain pen
scampers across the Sahara of the child’s leg into a crevice that is a universe without end
A bird with just one leg cocks its head as it perches
precariously on a dangling branch rocking this way and that
while below a bendy worm brown with ingested earth
tantalises the senses of hungry sparrowdom
Then without warning something happens
A cosmic shudder
An instant of momentary reverberation that transmits the echo of an explosion
many light years away
The child feels nothing but a hiccup
The bird forgets the worm and looks up and blinks
In that millisecond something went dark and somewhere a world ended
Goodbye
Somewhere else another world began
Hello again