Alone

Across the miles of snow, your pain stretches out to me. You are floating in the night sky with the drifting snow, and you send out a tendril through the cold. It touches me. I wake from my slumber, look around, seek your face. But I cannot see you. Here with me is a fragment of who you are, this fragile tender shoot that has grown to transcend the distance, yet again. For we keep moving, keep uprooting ourselves. You especially, you have been replanted so many times I can't count the number of soils you have twined roots into. And how many little pieces of yourself have ripped away each time your growing plant has been transplanted?

Yet the vines connecting us never wither. Across a continent, across an ocean, we are the same. Born together, we are bound together. Now you have replanted yourself again, closer by but still hours away. Our roots don't tangle together these days; we grow in different soils and when the rain is watering me, snow is freezing you. I worry about frostbite for you, and I wish the Sun would thaw the hard ground where you are trying so desperately to grow, and encountering only ice. I don't sing to the Sun for myself anymore, to shine down on me--I sing for you, and send His rays away from myself because they need to hit you instead. I need a mirror, to reflect that warmth across the rivers and farms.

Can I be the moon, at least, to turn the light toward you? to cast pale moonbeams into the dark sky where you hang? The whirling snow will glow where the moonlight illuminates it: a hundred white dancers, stark against the black sky. You are stationary amid all the spinning, green amid all the black and white. In the wind, your leaves flutter gently, and your roots sway, naked in the winter air. Nothing holds you down, but nothing holds you up, either. Where is the Gardener, to plant you in a pot? to wrap your exposed roots in soil to protect them? to fertilizer and water you, to put you in the sun or shade, wherever you would grow best?

I am only a plant myself. I can't give you a pot, or shine on you like the Sun, or rain on you. My leaves don't reflect the light enough to even be the moon. But I will never untangle our twining vines. If a few drops of water flow down my stems to roll down to your roots, that is enough to make me glad.