TREE Your skeletal form silhouetted against a mackerel sky. Bare twisted branches, gnarled witchlike fingers, pointing skywards, clawing outwards. Performing your dance macabre, to the music of the winter wind. A slanting morning sun, with Midas touch, gliding your gyrating limbs. At eventide, You were bedecked in coal black crows and aping Autumn, shed some feathered leaves. They looped, swooped, tumbled like leaves caught in a September squall. A blast of gunshot rent the air stripping you of your fluttering shroud, leaving your skeletal form, silhouetted against the evening sky. -- Barbara Diamond, "Leitrim Guardian" contemporary poet