When the world was young,
when deer were discovering lions,
and maggots were discovering deer,
far away from that circle of life
there was an artfully hidden glade.
In it, there was a snake slithering up a tree.
Its body wrapped around the trunk,
feeling the dull edges of the bark,
feeling the sun bringing out the water.
It thought this was lovely.
It had been so cold for so long;
there hadn’t been a moment of the comfortable warmth
of which this tree had an abundance.
“Why are you warm and I cold,"
the snake asked, inching up the trunk still.
The tree hummed, and rumbled out its reply,
“Because we each have a different gift,
but this need not cause a rift."
The snake spent years coming to and from that same tree.
Always asking a desperate question,
always the only one crawling up its trunk.
One day, two humans were under the tree,
one of them asking questions, and only getting shrugs.
“That human seems so cold,"
the snake said to the tree.
It made its way down the trunk,
thinking of how confusing the cold had once been.
The other human had walked away from the tree,
the cold one left standing alone.
The snake called for the human’s attention, and said,
“If all of this hurts and addles your mind,
this tree helps, even if you feel behind."
The following day,
the snake discovered that trees could be felled.
It was resigned to an eternity robbed of its friend’s warmth.
The tree was felled by the two humans.
“Why,"
the snake asked, inching up the corpse.
That cold human laughed, and out tumbled the end of the world,
“Because it knew the answer to my question."
Recommendation: The Singing Chameleon by Gcina Mhlope and Kalle Becker. It’s a fable about figuring out your gifts and finding the place you fit into. My sibling and I had hard copy of this book growing up, and I remember reading it a lot, and getting in trouble for drawing on the pages in it.