Scientists reckon 400 billion
trees share earth with us, share life’s air with us.
Let each human care for 57,
choose them on sight, touch each one and discuss
what care means. Make each cypress a playmate,
each oak a resting place. I’ve studied you
frolicking among an old cypress’s
vines, resting with your sister—a brief queue
of two—on an oak’s bent neck. Caresses
you offer Rocky Mountain pines relate
how you understand.
When our trees first rose
millions of years ago, did our first lives
run among them, swing branches in air dance,
our bright spirits nourished by all that thrives
in nature? You, poised in your yoga stance
on one leg atop a stone, that blue spruce
mutely looking on, must confirm it all,
its body and your body standing tall.
Roger Armbrust
December 30, 2014
