We see ourselves in them. We depend on them to learn to be extra human and what resilience means. They’re our timekeepers, our spirit guides, our family members.
I spend a whole lot of time in an historical forest lined in timber older than me for hundreds of years. Bushes underneath which 1000’s of different people have walked on toes that now not exist, carrying their sorrows and their goals in hearts which have turn into earth. Bushes which have witnessed world wars and marriages, which were rising since earlier than we constructed the bomb and decoded the human genome, earlier than Einstein imagined relativity and Nina Simone imagined “Mississippi Goddam” , a few of them alive when Bach was alive.
I usually surprise what they might say if they may discuss. However perhaps they would not say something in any respect — perhaps they might inform a reality past phrases.
It’s this poet Dorianne Laux intimate in his charming poem “The Lifetime of Bushes”, present in his assortment Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems (public library) and browse right here to the sound of the piece “Optimist” by cellist and composer Zoë Keating taken from her transcendental album In the trees.
THE LIFE OF TREES
by Dorianne LauxThe pines rub their nice noise
within the glittering darkness, scratching
their branches scratching towards the home,
and the thriller of the moan roughly interprets
within the drudgery of property: time
pull the hangar ladder,
climb on the roof with a noticed
between my enamel, reduce
these suckers down. What’s the actuality
in any other case an extended exhaustive grimace
of the blade, the enamel? I need to sleep
and dream the lifetime of timber, of beings
of the dumb world that cares
nothing for Cash, Politics, Energy,
Will or Proper, who need little of the evening
however just a few darkening useless stars, a white owl
rising from their limbs, who solely need
sink their roots into moist soil
and terrify worms or shake
their troubled heads like mannequins
or outdated hippies. If timber may discuss
they would not, simply hum a bit
inexperienced observe, roll their pine cones
stroll down the empty streets and blame him,
with a shrug, on the chilly wind.
In the course of the day they sleep indoors
their furry bark, the shredding clouds
like historical lace above their crowns.
Solar. Rain. Snow. Wind. They concern
nothing however hurricane and fireplace,
this whipped tyrant who rises
and turns into his personal useless father.
Within the storms the younger
bend and bend and outdated individuals know
they could not get there, go down
with the electrical traces that sparkle,
damaged within the trunk. They throw
their branches, forked sacrifice
on clay. They do not pray.
In the event that they make a sound, it is eaten
by the wind. And although the celebrities
return they don’t supply thanks, solely
ooze a sticky sap from their roundness
concentric wounds, straighten their thorns
and breathe, and breathe once more.
Full with Mary Oliver’s poem ‘After I Am Among the many Bushes’ and Helene Johnson’s ‘Bushes at Night time’, then revisit Hermann Hesse’s century-old poetic love letter to timber.
#poem #marginal