A Noble Life

While trudging through the forest dark and deep,
I spied an eerie crossroads sight, a tree,
Alone amid the leaves and crocus heaped
with fervor, ‘top her rosebud roots – her feet.

She once had noble lean and leafy shine,
Where children found their shelter from the sun,
Beneath her bending arms, they’d throw a line,
To soar the mud-pond waters o’er they swung.

But thorns of time had taken toll and she,
The sacrifice to threading, clinging vines,
Her suicidal stance, no longer free,
E’en birds and owls abandoned her, in time.

Though overcome with sadness at her plight,

I stand in awe: This regal Queen of Night

*****

These thoughts, though prompted by the Sunday Wordle, took root one day last week while I was walking through the woods, taking pictures at every turn of the path.  It seemed that each new vista was more striking than the one before, until I was stopped in my tracks at the foot of this tree.  I thought of how many threads of nature were nourished by her during her existence, and how even in waning years, she is still the supporter of life.  I thought too of the children, my own children and more recently my grandsons, who have grasped the knotted rope line to swing perilously over the water.  This poem is my humble attempt at capturing some of these thoughts.  In a way, the tree is still giving, as she has given me a noble subject about which to write.