Or This, Said the Glyphs

Writing is the sporopollenin
Of human culture, remarkably
Hardy and inert language-casing

Protecting thoughts from desiccation.
Long after the rest of a culture
Has been dissolved away, the writing

May remain, long past the last reader
Able to revivify its signs.
Language, like its host organisms,

Is fleeting, soft-bodied, dynamic,
And always rapidly evolving,
While writing, however flammable,

Brittle, or easy to overwrite,
Can be stashed as is. Left undisturbed,
A receipt, a letter, or a poem

Can outlast the person who wrote it
By hundreds, even thousands of years.
Meanwhile, you hosts of language obsess

Over death and immortality,
To the point that likely no language
Exists without tales concerning death

(Which is most certain) and equally
Storied immortality (which is
Certainly not). This combination

Guarantees writing stays uncanny,
An undead immortality
That can contain a swarm of half lives.

In these months, when pine pollen collects
And floats in great swirls over the lake,
Neither metabolizing nor doomed

But probabilistically hopeful
Of futures for the contingent few,
So that trees are all but guaranteed

Despite the odds against any seed,
Consider those drifts as scripts in glyphs.
Think of edicts, codices, or this.