The wind bends through the trees

in a language only the leaves understand,

a soft push, a whispered lifting,

a reminder that even the heaviest branches

can sway.

Above me, the sky is stitched in blues

deep as secrets in one breath,

light as forgiveness in another.

The pines stand like sentinels,

their green unwavering,

while some branches hold the yellow

of quiet endings.

Others are bare,

their story already returned to the earth.

Light slips between the gaps,

casting shapes across the grass,

the way truth sneaks through silence.

A bird trusts my open hand,

takes a peanut,

and disappears into the moving green.

All around me

cones scattered like unwritten sentences,

blackberries winding their own wild paragraphs,

shadows folding and unfolding

as clouds wander by

chaos and peace live side by side,

neither asking permission of the other.

Here, betrayals fall like pine cones.

They hit the ground with a weight

you cannot always hear,

but you can feel.

Left long enough,

the sharp edges soften,

they sink into the soil,

they turn to compost.

Not gone,

but changed.

And yet,

in the curated corners of the world,

none of this is written.

Only the polished pictures remain,

smiles framed without the ones

who bore the weight.

The heavy lifters left outside the lens,

while those untouched by the labor

stand centered in the frame,

as if they had carried it all along.

But the forest keeps the full story.

It holds the fallen and the standing,

the loyal roots and the broken limbs.

It tells me:

Feel the break.

Release the weight.

Root again.

And so I lay it here,

at the feet of the pines,

where wind can carry what I cannot,

where the ground knows

how to turn even the deepest cuts

into something that can grow again.

~Kerri-Elizabeth~

The unraveling, the walk through the parts of the forest no one shows on social media!!!