for Debbie and the 300 year old oak
The oak sits across our property line
on the border of our neighbor’s field.
It’s tagged with hot pink tape
tied to a surveyor’s stake marked “clearing line.”
We have seen these words before,
down the road at the old Caswell place,
now sold, where the county made way
for a sewer line. They slashed and chipped
and hauled away shaggy hickories
and tulip poplars tall as the stars (my kids said).
We grieved for those old ones
and now these: the oak and her sisters,
towering over the fence row–
gods and goddesses of the fields and forest
and the path you walk every day.
Today, you kneel, lean your ear
to her furrowed bark, and listen:
You hear the sweetness flow down
from leaves a hundred feet above.
You hear the whispers of the sisters:
the nearby oak and beech, their roots
beneath in subterranean embrace.
You hear the dozer tracks clack
and I hear you cry, stand, arms aloft
like the limbs above as you give thanks
in words known only to you and the tree.