A Pouch of Seeds

My shadow reminds my soul that as a young teen it lived in the woods and fields. The pouch I slung over my shoulder caught up seeds and stones, cones and dreams. I invented a rolling gate I called the mile-eater, which I used on old dirt roads at dusk, hungry and afraid of the dark. My hat and my stick had a pact to fence my heart and hold my head together when the light was too beautiful or the trees bid me disperse and fly up into them like a drunken swarm of bees. I was filled to bursting with linden leaves and emptied by the distant calls of crows, like respiration. Striding between the landlocked sycamores, the portal to my principality, a young mage caught in the tidal flow of my own longings.