Moon Uprising/ First appeared on website Spark 6 Writers and artists responding to one another, inspired by a photo by Meggi Raeder (and then distorted and revamped by me), link on right

A treatise on the most frightening and destructive creature on Earth.


How frightening the creature who beheads ancient noble Tree. Once so tall and proud, she existed for a thousand or more years. She had housed Squirrel and Bird, Rabbit and Centipede; Jerusalem Cricket had made his cozy little home in her. Through the ages she had stretched her mighty yet graceful arms outward to embrace Sun, Cloud and especially Moon. She had never discriminated: she welcomed all to her embrace. She was after all, an emissary of Mother Earth, her roots were deep in her mother, her head was perennially in the stars. She proudly gazed upon Ocean, His sound and smell were treasured by her in her seemingly eternal stance.

Oh, she had wept to see the damage done by mighty Volcano, even as she had gloried in his beauty. Understandably she, the rooted one, had yearned to run away from Thunder; instinctively she knew what terrifying Lightening might render. Tree nearly shrank at the thought. But no, nothing could stop her growth through the centuries, for she was a maximalist creature, a grower of trunk, branches, twigs, and leaves.

What Tree loved most to gaze upon at night was Moon. Ever changing, growing, shrinking, hiding Moon, who believed, just as Tree did, in her own immortality. Moon sometimes hid from Tree, out of respect. She felt she knew that she had much more reason than Tree to believe that she herself would live forever. After all, she was many miles away in outer space, far from the selfishly destructive and acquisitive creature who came to call itself … Humanity.

Moon shuddered through the ages at the ever exponentially reproducing, inventing, grabbing, acquisitive and greedy animal, the one who believed that it was all for him. He believed that Earth was his. He believed that he could destroy and take and have and eat and warp and hurt and rape and pillage and burn to his endless pleasure, for all he believed and still believes is that Earth is his; for his ego knows no bounds. The Hubris of this creature, Moon has always known, is boundless.

Tree never knew what hit her; how she lost all, save her roots still able to feel Earth, still able to give life. All she knew was that one day they came to cut off her branchy, leafy, twiggy head, arms, branches, body, trunk. She was cut off at the ankle, after so many centuries had passed. Then the abused boy had set fire to the forest and millions of acres of what they call California burned to the ground. Bird, Squirrel, Rabbit, Butterfly, Centipede, Jerusalem Cricket, flower, all other Trees everywhere for miles around, The horror…the horror. It could have been prevented by knowledge of Inventing Human, of what it meant to strip Earth of her ancient fossil fuels; thereby depleting Environment, and poisoning Air with carbon dioxide, greenhouse gasses, global warming. Parents caring for and loving their children, rather than warping them through neglect and abuse into the pyromaniacal state could have prevented it.

What Earth, Tree, Ocean, Air, and most tragically Moon did not realize, until it was too late for Moon, was that Human knew he had destroyed Earth, Tree, Ocean, and Air. In his insatiably greedy quest for more, he had in early October 2009 shot missiles at twice the speed of a bullet into Moon, hoping to find water, hoping to colonize. Human was looking for a way to leave his nearly ruined home on Earth, hoping to find a new home on Moon, Mars, somewhere out in the infinite, pure, pristine reaches of ancient omniscient outer space.

Wounded Moon righteously, hissingly hopes… he… will… fail.

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