Gossip from the Trees

For this week, I am attempting this bravery thing once again, so here is a poem I wrote last year which I rediscovered last week.  I’ve got a few others in the pipelines at the moment as well, but I find summer is a hard season for the writing of poetry.  It all gets lost in endless hot days and the relentless race to keep up with the plant harvest!  Still and all, here is the one I wanted to share today.  I hope that you enjoy it!

Gossip from the Trees

Birch led the way first –

trembling with eagerness, quicksilver,

snowdrops underfoot, speaking

crystalline songs of beginnings, and joy,

and surging sap beating the bounds,

silver lady ever first in the new lands,

and Rowan echoed her, garbed

in red berries and fierceness, and blood,

always blood, jewelling her boughs, speaking

of strength and pride and witch nature,

hasty to the fight, fierce,

while Alder counselled patience, the boundaries

between fire and water, the need for balance,

always the shield between fire’s quick nature and water’s

slow wisdom.

Pine had little to say, but said it well, leading

always by example, beads of fragrant amber

jewelling her bark, showing the beauty of winter,

and slow moving days, silence when it is needed.

Oak spoke then, measured and strong,

roots deep in the earth, leaves and boughs

that withstand the strongest storm

and yet willow, always bending with the winds and rarely breaking,

counselled pliance, endurance, as she always does,

gazing at her own reflection in

the riverwater, dotted with gilded lilies and green leaves,

and knowing always the difference between

waltzing with the storm, and merely withstanding it.

And beneath them all, bramble trembled, toothed and weary,

loving always those princes too well as they

fight through to the buried castle,

reaching to clasp vines with the rose who

reflects the princess in her tower,

rose pink, sun gold, always beautiful.

And I, rootless tree that I am, speak always and ever of joy,

impermanence, transience, mankind’s

short years, the transition through seasons,

and my leaves are tales

lost in the telling, returning always to earth.