Poetic Prose: Tree Talk
Baldric’s story of when he met a tree.
Listen to Tree Talk
Tree Talk
a poem by Baldric the Poet
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A tumble leaves me in a heap, smelling the dusty scent of hard-packed clay. The culprit, a grayish-brown root, juts up from the path with an upside-down grin, guess you can call it a frown. A toe-size gap makes it the culprit.
Rolling onto my back, I gaze up at a towering tree and take time to think. Trees, I muse, are sentient giants that weep sap thicker than blood when wounded. The wind uses them as its violin, creating a rustling symphony of shimmering laughter as children clamber up their limbs, and later soothing lullabies to shoosh them to sleep at night. We sit back and cheer when the rain unleashes thousands of tiny drum beats that fall into step with the marching leaves.
But they leave the adult talk to the roots. Along their underground network of threads, ropes, and arteries; they whisper about thirst and despair. Slow, ponderous talk, an ancient silent language, born from the sage wisdom of long lives and hardship. This tree speaks the language of patience, coaching, and helping each other grow tall amid a famine of hard-packed clay.
Tree talk is slow talk. Both their whispers and screams, it take years to reach other trees and responses come years later. It took years for this tree’s handshake to finally reach me. My response, far less tedious and slightly out of vengeance, is much quicker. I buried the offending root in a mound of dirt and compost, which caused me to level out the mound by shoveling and spreading even more dirt and compost; until finally, I finish by watering it all down for several hours to keep the dogs from eating goat turds.
A sudden gust of wind sweeps through, making branches shiver and groan, and the leaves rattle and shake. Just as suddenly, the wind dies down, and the tree lets out a long and sustained — sigh. Settling at the foot of the tree, I whisper back — “Nice to meet you too.”
