poetry

The Wayfarer: The Empty Chair

Posted on by SomatiCat

On life, death, and the illusion in between.

The Wayfarer walked into a grassland with no beginning and no end. Brown leaves rustled as he walked through the knee-high grasses. It was like autumn before winter, stood still for eternity. The sky was gray, with no sun in sight. He couldn’t tell the time of day.

Like scattered drops of rain striking the surface of dried mud, he saw green spots far apart in the distance. They were trees, still alive. The brown grassland was sparsely marked with droplets of green.

The Wayfarer walked toward one of the trees, and he saw a man sitting under it. He looked as old as the grassland. His skin was dry, like the leaves of the grasses, almost peeling away from him.

“Hello,” the Wayfarer said.

The man did not move. His gaze was set toward the far end of the grassland, which seemed never to end. The tree was quiet. No birds nested in it. It simply stood there, without even casting a shadow on the earth.

Leaving the old man behind, he kept walking toward another tree far ahead. No insects leaped from the grasses. Only the sound of rustling leaves could be heard as he walked through them.

Under the second tree, the Wayfarer found a younger man sitting as well.

“Hello,” he said.

The man did not even look at him. He looked like a soldier after a defeated battle. Caked mud covered his legs, and his face was stained with soot. His gaze, too, was set toward the far end of the grassland.

The trees were far apart. Whenever he saw a faint green dot in the sea of grasses, like an island in a desert, he walked toward it, unhurried and steady. One after another, he saw a person, young or old, sitting under a tree, all gazing far away from here, into the beyond, in silence and stillness. He did not know how many trees he visited. He did not know how long he had been walking.

The Wayfarer came upon another tree and stopped in his tracks. After so many occupied chairs, all frozen in time, an absence felt like thunder in the silent sky. The chair was empty. Had the person who sat there just left? he wondered. Was it the beginning or the end? Then he noticed a beautiful mandala on the ground beneath the tree, glimmering and shimmering with many colors.

He suddenly felt tired and sat in the chair, his gaze set on the faraway horizon. Then he noticed a spider lowering itself from a branch on a strand of silk. As the Wayfarer watched, it spun its web between the branches. The intricate web overlapped his view of the never-ending grassland, and he did not know whether he was staring at the end or the beginning.

A butterfly came dancing on iridescent wings. It was like a light in the bleak landscape. Then it was caught in the spider’s web. The last fluttering of its wings sent waves through the silk. Another butterfly came and was trapped, and another. The spider wrapped them in silk, and their wings were torn free and fell to the ground like cherry blossom petals, glimmering and shimmering.

The Wayfarer realized that the mandala was made of thousands of butterfly wings, lives caught in the web and fallen there. It had been repeated from the beginning of time into its never-ending present.

He looked back to where he had come from and found that his tracks, too, had formed a spider’s web.

©2026 JU

Kiquawa Tree

Posted on by SomatiCat

When heaven slept, dreaming a dream of a thousand rivers in the sky, its only child crawled out of the cradle of wind, crawled to the edge of the cloud, and fell to the earth.The wingless child fell without a wail, and died.

When heaven lost its only child, the first drop of its tear fell upon a Kiquawa tree on a hill. Then it turned into rain that would never end. It rained and rained upon all the creatures of the earth. Day turned into night, and the earth turned into the sea, at the bottom of which the drowned forest stood silently, like a wingless bird without a singing voice.

The Kiquawa tree on the hill looked down upon the earth and up toward the sky, and asked heaven not to let its tears flood the world.Heaven said,

How can you tell me not to cry? I have lost my only child. My child fell to the earth. The earth engulfed my wingless child and did not give it back. I look down and see the earth full of beings, yet none are mine. My tears will never cease, until all the earth lies beneath the sea of my sorrow, as silent as the starless night of the sky.

The Kiquawa tree said,

Then let me bear your child. I will take in your tears and nurse the child with them. I will give my limbs for its bones. Your tears will be its blood, and its flesh will grow. When it grows, it will worship you from the earth. You will have forests full of children to look upon you.

After one hundred sixty-eight days and nights, the rain quietly ceased. Half of the night turned into day, and the Kiquawa tree bore a child. It suckled tears from the earth. The earth grew dry, and birds began to sing.Then another Kiquawa tree bore another child, who suckled more tears from the earth. Gradually, half of the sea returned to land, and the forest was filled with children of the Kiquawa trees.

When the wingless children grew, they admired heaven, whose tears had become their blood. When a child died upon the earth, it was buried beneath a Kiquawa tree. Its bones returned to the tree, and the tree drank its blood and returned it to heaven as morning mist. Somewhere in the forest, another Kiquawa tree would bear another child.

Still, from time to time, heaven silently sheds tears for the only child it lost long ago.

© 1996 J.U.

Author’s note:

This story is a myth of grief that cannot be undone. What is lost is not recovered, but transformed. Through the body and the earth, sorrow becomes life again.

Of course, the images are AI generated.

Dead and Naked

Posted on by SomatiCat

At Fort Lauderdale Airport, there was a long line for baggage check-in and security screening. As a hub for cruise travelers, the airport gets especially busy at certain times of the day. I stood in line for over an hour.

Airport staff maneuvered wheelchair-bound passengers through the crowd, one after another, weaving between the lines. Most of the people waiting were elderly—older than me, likely returning home from their first or perhaps their last cruise.

A month ago, I lost my 13-year-old dog. Since then, every time I see someone walking a dog, I’m struck by a strange feeling—a bittersweet sadness, like a drop of water hitting the surface of a lake, sending ripples outward until they fade into the distance. The pain of loss is universal, something we all share. Every person here will, at some point, feel what I feel now—the grief of losing a beloved companion.

I looked around and imagined cadavers on dissection tables, standing in line now—dead and naked. Sooner or later, we all end up there, in one way or another. We share the same destination. I am among them.

Is that a relief? Perhaps. At the very least, the vision freed me, if only for a moment, from the vulnerability of being.