RORY HOPKINS
The Cloud, they call it.
the centre of it all.
collecting life
in dusty digital vaults,
in worlds behind subscription.
behold, my child.
it spreads,
a bloodied trail of code
from the veins of the city
to the heart of the bush
where it hums.
not the murmurs of life,
ancient and interdependent,
but the whine of machina
that suffocates the hen’s frantic call
and swallows the crickets
in its cacophony.
through thickets and foliage,
where perishing root systems lie crumbling
like gravestones.
it stands tall, erect, grotesque,
hemmed by twisted wire,
reaching high above the canopy,
an alien sun.
The Cloud, they call it —
what sacrilege.
long ago, there were only trees
and only vapour above them.
the birds nestled in their branches,
the insects scurrying through their leaves,
the vines curled around their limbs,
each a child speaking a story
into rings etched in wooden abdomens.
they are the world’s oldest listeners
who heard their children
just like you hear me now.
and of all these primordial tales,
the calls, the exhales, the songs of existence,
absence, my child, is the loudest of all.
the blinded cries of the birds,
the cicadas lost in flight,
the brittle crunch of fallen vines underfoot,
is the of the trees.
behold the terrible burden of their knowledge.
to listen is to know,
to know is to tell,
for what is a secret
if not the promise of betrayal?
to expose the stories they have guarded so carefully
is to be autopsied by axe,
spilling an ancient library onto forest floor
where resin bleeds into detritus,
a violent alchemy.
The Cloud, they call it.
this is a new age, my child,
the final one.
oh, how it will become grey:
your soul stored in petabytes,
your thirst justified by dying empires,
your eyes dulled by pixels.
ever so connected
yet never so alone.
the last trees will remember us,
but they will remember this too.
look up, sweet child, smell the petrichor.
the cloud is full,
and it is starting to rain.
Rory Hopkins is a Sydney-based writer who enjoys chess, martial arts and Cormac McCarthy novels.
He almost died in Kathmandu, spent a year gallivanting in Berlin, and is crashlanding towards the finish line of a Creative Writing and Sociology degree.
The Cloud is Full, and It is Starting to Rain is reflective of his interest in exploring a changing modern world.