The Tree of Life

The Devil’s Tower rises from

earth to heaven,

bark turned to stone,

800 feet of column carved

straight into the sky.

Some say it was once a tree —

the trunk our ladder,

the branches our passage.

The giants walked among us then,

until the tree was felled

and heaven was cut off,

all that remained was a rock —

a very large rock.

But humankind has never been content

with simply a rock.

A rock is a paradox,

a warning, a haunting.

We worship what can crush us.

Our temples have always been

carved from stone.

And now: 3I-ATLAS,

a mass unlike any we’ve seen before,

discovered on a July night in Chile,

near Saturn’s rings,

hurtling toward the sun,

130,000 miles per hour.

Dismissed as space rubble —

until a Harvard professor went rogue,

blew the paradigm wide open,

left room for the possibility of life,

over coffee on a morning talk show.

Harvard calls it an interstellar object,

the rogue scientist a UFO,

Reddit can’t agree.

YouTube calls it the mothership:

the return of galactic parents

to a house we have ruined.

NASA says nothing

of what the giants look like,

but novels promised they’d be

beautiful enough to distract us.

Perhaps they are here to prevent 2040,

or only to witness our end —

to remind us that the Earth

has been fine without us all along.

Perhaps the mothership

is only the Tree of Life returning,

branch by branch,

trunk to trunk,

root to root,

to lift her children

back into heaven —

or into extinction’s final light,

the sky carved once more into stone.