Pine Woods

Pine woods are dead. Or almost dead.
Yet they entice with unspoken mystery.
With dark ambiance and silence.

No birds fly here.
Little sign of life, 
Barring the trees themselves
And the spiders burrowing in the leafy peat.
No mushrooms to turn over dead leaves.
No fungi to cling to the trunks.

All calls and hoots are silenced by peat
And the trees’ uniform style.
Little room between pine tree and pine tree
To bounce on the pined ground - soft as sponge.
The trees strangle one another.
Darkening out light and even weather itself.
The darkness deepens the deeper one treads.
Look for light
And the trunks’ copper-red luminescence
Seems to glow in the surrounding dark.
That promise of light is a deceit..