I built a garden and planted a tree.
Not because it asked me to,
But because that was the first obscurity,
I learnt to solace in.

I let its descendants become my seasons,
Its blooms to be my gifts,
Its verdure to be my skies,
And its shade to be the place
I yearned for at the end of the day.

Beyond the garden
Stood a forest.

The tree had boughs touching it.
The birds came and went.
Carrying songs I never bothered to learn.

I didn’t hate the forest.
Because how could I condemn the tree,
To meet its mates?

One day I came up to the tree,
Like always.
I saw her brushing its leaves
With the trees of the copse.

That’s when I comprehended,
The tree had the forest,
I had just the tree.

And perhaps, the trees were never the problem.
Perhaps, it was my lapse
To build walls around my garden.
And calling one shadow,
my entire sky.

So I began,
digging the soil again.
Not to make the tree smaller.
Not to cut it.

But to plant my own forest,
with its own birds and flowers.

Where I once believed,
nothing else could have ripened.