Near my home there’s a beautiful park where I love to walk. Actually, it’s a parkway—part of an extensive park and boulevard greenway through the heart of midtown Kansas City. Created beginning in 1895 by distinguished landscape designer George E. Kessler, this preserve of natural beauty was promoted by local visionaries like August Meyer and William Rockhill Nelson. Today it holds secure a breathing space for busy urban dwellers.
What I love most about my park, besides the comfy rubberized walking path, is the trees. I can imagine that a few of these sycamore giants might have hung over wagon trains that used to stop at a spring (now directed underground) not far from my house. Gnarled and leaning, old trees line the path I walk, and call me to reflections on time and timelessness.
At the cottage, I enjoyed a book of meditations by Richard Wagamese, a Canadian of Ojibway heritage writing out of his everyday practice of traditional spirituality. The book is Embers. I commend it to you for the thoughts as well as the beautiful photography.
As suggested by the dab of information in the poem below, perhaps the trees in my neighborhood speak to each other, under the ground. For certain they speak to me as I observe their changing seasons and living and dying. A fascinating book I’m in the middle of is The Overstory by Richard Powers. Trees figure pretty big in his stories, too.
I’m not yet satisfied with the poem, with its abrupt and perhaps puzzling ending. It waits in my notebook for revision. Your comments are welcome. But I do imagine and even believe that trees and people and all creation interconnect in both physical and mystical ways. Taking time to be quiet in my green breathing space puts me in touch.
The photograph: an old oak tree in Ohio where I walked awhile ago.
INTERCONNECTED
Tree talk, tree people, as my own people say.Richard Wagamese, Embers
We hear a siren screaming through the trees.
We thought we’d left behind emergencies
that startle our sleep so often back in town
where gritty things are always coming down.
Will help come soon enough for something dire?
A heart attack? An injury? A fire?
Or God forbid there might have been a crime
out here in our retreat to the sublime.
I’ve read that fungus spreading underground
connects the roots of trees for miles around
with tree talk that Ojibway people know
helps all tree people harmonize and grow.
But what about the cedars we can see
dying around us, one by one, one tree
sick at the root? Whatever the paradigm,
that siren stops at someplace else this time.
Barbara Loots
I liked what you wrote in the blog and the poem. I like that you suggested a couple books.
As I write I am out on my deck in Iowa under a big maple tree that has joined the parade of colors on my street.
When I write a poem, I often remember to allow the poem to be written. What speaks through our words is often meant to be more free than the alterations we decide are necessary.
Today I read some poems that seemed to make me want them to be edited. It made me smile as I respected the poet and their delivery of poetry. I read those poems twice and let them be free to simply talk.