Haiku #37

The sunlight hurts his eyes, and he closes them in response.  Individual blades of grass poke through his worn shirt, stabbing viciously at the flesh of his back.  His head rests upon a gnarled tree root like an old man’s knuckles, the textured bark branding the back of his head.  The struggle to raise himself is accompanied by a headache and the sudden awareness of a stale, empty feeling throughout his midsection.  Above, subtle tremors of movement cascade down the tree trunk.

            One hand raised as a visor, he surveys the blurry expanse beyond his own shoeless feet.  Within a dozen yards, the trees end, giving way to a field of tall grass transitioning from green to tan in the late summer sun.  Too distant to make out clearly stands a line of shadows hinting at a mountain range, piles of gray shading on the horizon.  The cuts on his hands and forearms had scabbed over, but the dried blood remains.  He spits on his fingers and tries to wipe some away before wondering why he bothers and letting his eyes drift around him, behind him, back into the forest.  The sunlight flooding him with pain doesn’t dare force itself into the woods behind; at the edge of his vision he sees the boundary at which light and dark have struck an uneasy truce.  He stands.

            All his life he waited for something to happen, going to sleep every night and waking every morning with hope but without faith.  Now, something had happened; he runs his tongue along the now-jagged edge of a chipped tooth.  He leans against a tree trunk for support, as his feet and legs do not want to cooperate.  Standing at the last tree, the full breadth of the field – stretching to infinity on either side – becomes evident, as does something else.  He hears no sound.