Indifferent, Sincere: The Ordinary Exhale

Beneath the banyan's shadowed veil,
A promise fades, so cold and pale.
In grief's chill breath, it slips away,
Tendrils clutch echoes, lost to grey.

The roots descend without intention,
A tree feels nothing, pays no attention,
It does not know a vow was made here,
It only grows, indifferent, sincere.

And is that not the joke of it all,
That's what we call eternal will fall
Not into fire, not into betrayal,
But simply into the ordinary exhale.

The name carved in bark does not fade
Because the world is cruel or afraid,
It fades because wood is only wood,
And we asked it to remember what nothing could.

He stands beneath it, this man of ours,
Who measured his life in promises and hours,
And finds that lightness was always the truth,
That weight was the lie he inherited from youth.

To grieve is to insist that it mattered,
And perhaps it did, before it was scattered,
But the banyan spreads its crown regardless,
And beauty persists in the perfectly heartless.

What remains is not the promise but the standing here,
Not what was sworn but the swearing, the atmosphere,
The particular afternoon, the particular shade,
The unbearable lightness of what two people said.