Branching

I sat beneath trees today.  Leaves all green and plentiful.  It's springtime and everything is aflutter with life and liveliness and growth.  Another cloudy day in May that brought depth to my favorite color and made greener my every wandering sight.  As I looked up into the trees all around me, I began to take note of the webs of branches, reflecting the map of my thoughts reaching this way and that. I love the way trees grow. Firmly rooted in one solid, still and significant place, they reach out and defy all sense of reason or gravity as they try new routes and altering angles to bring breadth and circumference to the shade they provide.

Being a curious soul who has often wandered down varying paths and in multiple directions, often at the very same time, I am delighted by the wayward nature of tree branches.  They give me hope, as they fork and splay and traverse various trajectories, always staying rooted in the glory of the trunk, the core, the life force of their being.

Oddly enough, I found an old poem, a short one, that is more about tree rings than branches but the tree imagery is somehow relevant here.  See if you agree...

I wear a stack of rings

around my finger
Each with its own story
of who I used to be
the many lives I've lived
the ages of this gnarled soul
roots twisted between greens
sprouting through seasons
dying each new death
A grand victory of survival.

©2012 DOS

The excerpts of all of the poems presented in this blog are copyright protected, as each and every poem has been copyrighted.   For a complete copy of any poem, feel free to email your request to: duvallosteennyc@gmail.com.