The Tree, by J. W. Cassandra
(I recommend this short story to my dear friend, Ritika Nahata for her birthday)
„The trees stand where they have rooted in. They stand and sustain shade by their foliages, in springs they burst into flowers, in summers they ripen fruit, in autumns their foliages whirl down as colourful cavalcade, the forest litter guards the ground, in winters their branch-arms put on themselves rime and icicle adornments, they cover themselves in soft snow-veil. And they provide winter firewood… Table for the birds, yard for deers; matter for fence, for furniture, whatnot. As they don’t delight in their own flowers, their fruit do enjoy not they, but by all these, their duty is to nourish bees, insects, worms, birds; as they provide rots for squirrels, nests for the birds, firewood for the human, all these bear testimony to their existence that only aim what is the noblest: the service. They make possible by their existence, lives of myriad greater and smaller creatures, in return they need only proper soil, sunshine and rain of clean water. Well, and the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere that they breathe in through their woody pores. In return, they give oxygen that is the base of existence of all that greater and smaller creatures whom they provide so much besides… Oh, yes”, the Tree thinks, „actually the whole life is owing to us and this isn’t known for even any of these myriad tiny creatures ̶ except the human and us, trees… I don’t understand only why humans don’t leave off our senseless devastation?!”
And brushwood-fires glow up, then they spread on, monstrous machines, monsters rumble to extirpate the forests giving lungs of the planet, trees being in their prime, lean on the ground one after the other, the earth is shattering, queaking…
The Earth’s complaint is but fruitless, as that of the mass cry out against it: the birds’ hovering, shrieking above their nests, the roes, deers, squirrels on run… The human is deaf and blind:
