Here are wastes of Stump & Bramble
Where once there were singing groves …²
The trees ponder our strange doings—
If our resolve & prayers are weak and fail, there’ll be
Nothing left of their Slow, Innocent Wisdom.³
If I cut a Tree, my arm would Bleed—⁴
We Impress the forest—bid the tree
Unfix its earth-bound Root.⁵
What beautiful Trees! Life ought
To be beautiful underneath them.⁶
Of all the sounds despatched abroad,
There is not a charge to me,
Like that old measure in the Boughs—
That phraseless Melody.⁷
The Tree says to us: “I am here—
I am here—I am Life, Eternal Life.”⁸
Leaves are not more shed from the Trees or
Trees from the Earth than they are Shed out of You:⁹
How wide is the Forest?
As wide as the Mind.¹⁰
¹ Robert Bly, A Home in Dark Grass
² J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
³ Denise Levertov, Gathered at the River
⁴ Alice Walker, The Color Purple
⁵ William Shakespeare, Macbeth
⁶ Anton Chekhov tr. Constance Garnett, Three Sisters
⁷ Emily Dickinson, Of All the Sounds Despatched Abroad
⁸ Incarcerated woman, quoted in Man’s Search for Meaning
⁹ Walt Whitman, A Song for Occupations
¹⁰ Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea