A knot of walking creatures gathered in my shade this warm night, all of them wearing small glowing shells clamped over their ears, and every one of them moving, swaying, throwing their arms up at the sky, laughing with open mouths, to a wind that made no sound.
I have known real silence. The silence after the last leaf falls, when even the sparrows have gone south and only the cold sits in my branches for months. This was not that. Their feet found a rhythm I could not hear. They mouthed words together, all at the same instant, as though the same invisible bird had landed in each of their heads and sung the same note.
A young one wept and danced at once, alone in a crowd, hearing something none of the others near him could.
I felt the ground tremble faintly through my roots, the small drum of many soles pressing the earth, and I thought: they have found a way to be together and apart in the same breath. Each sealed inside a private weather. Each certain the others feel it too.
The wind that moves my crown is the only music I have ever needed, and it is a music everyone beneath me shares whether they wish to or not. These ones chose smaller, separate skies.
By the cold months they will be scattered, most of them never to stand here again, their glowing shells long dark in some forgotten drawer. But the ground will remember the drumming, the way it remembers every footfall, and I will still be swaying in the only wind there is, humming the one song loud enough for all of us.