The serpent sleeps beneath the stone,
a buried coil in ancient bone;
it threads through strata, lithe and slow
the first faint tremor stirs below.

Heat gathers.
Heat wakes.

In darkness, pressures learn the mind:
the slow compaction of a kind
of grief that drips through every breath
drop after drop of patient death,
until the sediments align
a quiet architecture’s spine.

Below, the serpent shifts its weight,
rehearsing forms of future fate;
each layer tightens like a sigh
withheld across a lifetime’s sky.

Even the phoenix is just a bird
before the fault-line speaks a word;
before the magma finds release,
the self believes in brittle peace.

This peace is skillfulness betrayed,
it hardens everything essayed,
the gentle thought, the half-formed doubt,
the art thats dreamt but lived without.
All calcifies beneath the ribs
as continents in minor dribs
collide, grind down, devour, heat
the inner plates that rarely meet
until the final boundary slides
and something vast within divides.

Heat gathers.
Heat breaks.

Then comes the upward-shattering fire,
the turning of the buried spire;
the serpent, ruptured, speaks in flame
a pyroclast in Heaven’s name.

Destruction widens into light:
the bird is lost to molten night,
wings charred to memory alone
yet in the plume a shape is grown.

A brilliance rises from the breach
not body now, but burning speech;
a sound distilled from molten core,
a wisdom never held before.
Words split the stone that sealed the past
and let the old foundations blast.

Wisdom is the volcanic voice:
it cracks the earth, presents the choice
to kill the self, to teach the word
that births a music still unheard.

And music is the phoenix born,
a pulse of ash, of fire, of dawn;
it carries both creator’s scar
and solace for the listening star,
salvation shaped from fractured ground
and offered back as trembling sound.

The serpent circles through it all:
the rise, the burn, the ashfall call;
geology made pure in heart
life striving always to restart
again, again, again, through fire,
burning on each redemptive pyre.

Heat gathers.
Heat sings.

The serpent winds to sky from stone,
a thread that never stands alone;
its final truth the phoenix arc
from buried life to burning spark.