holiday poem

Trees, I can understand

Our lives are small in comparison, but intelligible;

We watch each other grow, saplings and striplings,

Our elements flow and mingle- carbon and blood; water, soil and sun;

But you, stone, confound me.

You carry mindless, scattered centuries inside you, pressed tight, layers of ancient dust compressed into your core.

A breeze-blown prehistoric frond fell across your flank and became your destiny;

a glacier dragged, inches each year, and carved uncaring features into your face;

symphonies of dying stars played out above your mud plugged eyes.

Human cares, the pulse and play of voices and footfalls on sidewalks, the tendrils of spring flowers in rich black soil, the dreams of children, are meaningless, less than trivial to you.

Today I crawled beneath the shipwrecked roots of an ancient tree with my daughter, and imagined with her the slight green tendrils thickening through centuries into the gnarled roof of roots above our heads;

I prayed in the guttural tones of my forefathers

that her wondering upturned glance, her small fingers on cracked bark, would somehow

rise like sap to every branch and bough, warming the currents of air for hatchling birds for many years yet to come.

********