Revisionist Poetry – “Where the Fungus Keeps Vigil” – Colonizing Decay, v.5

In the oldest quarter of the woods,
where daylight arrives already dying,
the trees stand gaunt and funereal,
their bark split open
like the walls of abandoned crypts.

From these wounds
the fungus enters.

Not violently—
never violently.

It arrives the way sorrow arrives:
gradually,
patiently,
through the smallest fractures.

White tendrils creep beneath the skin of the forest,
threading through root and marrowwood,
until every living thing
shares the same subterranean fever.

The air there is damp with exhalation,
thick with the smell of wet soil
and things too long buried.

Mushrooms bloom in clusters
like diseased roses upon the dead,
their pale caps luminous in the dark,
as though the forest itself
has grown eyes.

And perhaps it has.

For something ancient stirs beneath the loam—
a vast and speechless hunger
that feeds not merely upon bodies,
but upon time itself.

The trees lean inward to hear it.
The moss kneels before it.
Even the shadows seem rooted there.

We enter these woods trembling,
feeling the silence cling to our skin
like funeral lace,
and leave with the terrible understanding
that decay is not destruction.

It is devotion.

It is the long and holy process
by which the earth reclaims its own.