Gods Love Mortals
“My fingers split. My arms throbbed, and broke wide open. Working fibers snaked down the veins of my lungs. My feet seized and held the bank of the river, a root from my spine to the soil, and down, into the cold stone. Wide into the sky held my beseeching arms. They branched, and my full-leafed embrace filled the blue from where I panted, a green-pithed tree, rooted to the earth.
Well, Apollo loved me then, weeping, feeling the trilling of my human hear within my wooden girth. Because the gods love mortals. They seek our beauty, our courage, our joy. They envy us our hope. We are in our hearts what they can never master, and all the night long the lord of light knelt beside me, weeping for the love he would never win.
To this day when a daphine blossoms, or when any tree breaks into leaf, you can feel how the sun is chastened, faithful to the living he can worship but never possess. And as for me - feel no sorrow. When you see the wind stir the greenwood, or when you turn the pages of a book made from a tree’s sitll-blameless flesh, lean close and listen.
You hear my voice.”
- Michael Cadnum, Daphne