Black Walnut tree
Will you remember she
With whom we break a hole
In the clean blonde field
Just out of winter, showing signs of spring,
To place your tender roots,
Your head barley reaching to the knee?
Will you look down on us
When in age we lean on you
And later will you reach to embrace us
When we lie beneath, your roots grown strong,
Carressing and dissolving our bones
To nourish you one last time?
As she planted you in the shade of the Persimmon tree
That the deer she wrestles with love,
With the peach and apple trees your siblings,
As we sprinkled you with water that day
You came upon yourself already begun
And we wondered "What shape waits in the soul?".
Because she plans and plants, this gardener,
With the great Oak beside her,
For that time of embrace
When the rich dirt of your nut
Gives back to the Ridge
And warms us beneath
When your treasured wood, she thinks,
Might be needed to support us;
She who tends the chickens,
Naming them one by one,
The tables, the vegi - tables, the berries good,
And all that nourishes the way she nourished you.
She stands beside her Oak;
The Persimmon and the Oak,
That shade and protect the Ridge
And that it owns,
And these standing-tall trees,
Like strong trees where they branch,
Make "V"s of vim and vigor that grow
And sustain this kept-sustainable land.
Will you remember even this warming summer day,
When you stood in the shade,
With the lazy blacks circling up high,
Punctuating sometimes as much with a question mark
As a period, the last word?
Save, perhaps, for the Word from the Gates of Heaven,
Your scarlet neighbor, whom some object to,
While she objects back.
If you do sustain as she,
Then there will be no need to remember
Since all will see her Garden Eden;
This Mother Earth.
