Where will you be, my love, when the trees become
skeletons, haunting,
reminding me all is gone?

Where will we be, dearest, when the time comes
for you to return
to corrupted territory awash
in heatwaves and malaria
while I remain, lost in the land
of death and ice, alone?

Why not run
away to where the death-trees cannot find
us, to create our own edenic gardens?

What keeps us in our hell-holes held-up locked
in spiraling misery?