A tree falls in a forest, but no one’s around,
So follows the question: does it make a sound?
Or does stillness blanket where the echo should be,
Unheard, unmade, like thoughts lost at sea?
If air never trembles inside of a mind,
Is motion still motion, or something confined?
Does the bark split loudly, or quietly break,
If ears are the only translators we make?
And what of the moment before it descends?
Does the fall even start if it never quite ends?
If time isn’t witness, does it even pass,
Or pool in the roots and sleep under grass?
Perhaps it rises, inverted through air,
Breaking the world in ways no eye can bear.
Or maybe it waits in a permanent poise,
Suspended between the absence of noise.
Does nothing bear witness more purely than we,
Who clutter the quiet with certainty?
Suppose I am there, yet forget I exist,
Can memory hold me, or fade to a mist?
If I hear it later, replayed in my head,
Was the silence alive, or the echo just dead?
So I ask, and the question unravels the ground:
Is it sound that needs ears, or ears that need sound?
And which of them breaks when the other is gone,
The tree, or the thought we were standing upon?
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