Tree of Hope

It stood there
-and the distant fires of passion
Were ghastly dancing around it-
the old tree.
They called it a whisperer in the fog.
A confessional, the believers called it,
Who never found the warmth of the old tree
In the cold chest of the stone buildings,
And every passer-by could consider it a friend
In the dim illumination.

And today, in the crack of dawn
Of the new millennium, the old tree was cut,
Treacherously thorn from the hands of believers,
A scream on earth’s thirsty lips,
The scream of the entire exhausted world.
Drowning this moment, this hour,
Or an eternity.
Because it is worn by the cold wind’s of greed
Entwining it, touching it with a thousand lips
Clinging against the face of the diseased world.

The tree of hope is no longer here
For us to nail the mirror of conscience into it,
To see the reflection in it
Of whatever is left of the diseased world,
Just a skeleton in a warm black wave of sensual oblivion
A dream-lit slumber without dreams,
In which the entire diseased world was drowning.
The warm veil of passion fell onto the face of the world
And the tree of hope became a hopeless coffin.