Requiem For The Leaves

By: Eric Landry

Posted: 12/11/09

Each rake, in current-like motions, back and moving forward, compiles the casualties around us. The leaves died and no one cares. Never, even if long periods of time passed, such as months or years, will the leaves return. Naked and tall, every tree stands unaffected in the loss of its children. And we, unaffected too, walk over, on, and around the lifeless remains.

Leaves once, green and crisp, held thin branches in pairs or groups. Now they crumble under our feet as we trample on their memories like fascists. I can remember at least a few different occasions not too long ago, more than a few, where I saw leaves on trees. Just last summer, in fact, while sitting in my back yard decoding a cipher encrypted in Ann Coulter's book Treason that would reveal clues to a lost treasure hidden by the GOP, I looked up in contemplation and noticed leaves on trees.

Another time, while playing basketball with critically acclaimed local television movie director Douglas Bubbletrousers, I caught a glimpse of leaves, green, youthful and majestic, blowing in the wind. What happened? Trees, once full of babies, are now as barren as the author of the book I mentioned earlier. As you can see by my remembrances, the leaves appeared so young and promising as recently as this past summer. Yet somehow they withered and died prematurely, falling from their lofty positions.

Can there be another explanation besides poisoning? To what else can hasty death be attributed when health so recently resided in the subject now dead? Someone, obviously with the help of others, has executed a mass cleansing of the promising youth grown on trees. For what reason remains a mystery. Did they, the offenders, perhaps feel threatened by the leaves' potential, their youth? Were they envious of the leaves' position in the trees, responsible for only bathing in sunlight? Whatever the reason, the offenders enacted a great injustice and did so beneath our very eyes. And we ignore such injustice and violence as if we lived in imperial Rome, our hearts hardened and calloused.

All we can know about the offenders is that they are dangerous and powerful. They must be to be able to keep everyone so quiet and indifferent to the situation. A full investigation may never come, but the injustice must not be forgotten. The memory of the leaves must not be forgotten. Though I may threaten my own life in writing this article, we must remember. We must keep the leaves present.