ARBOR DAY

...and the First Prize is awarded for The Best Use of a Tree

Trees Need Not Walk the Earth

                                                                    David Rosenthal

Trees need not walk the earth  

For beauty or for bread; 

Beauty will come to them 

Where they stand. 

Here among the children of the sap

Is no pride of ancestry: 

A birch may wear no less the morning 

Than an oak. 

Here are no heirlooms 

Save those of loveliness,

In which each tree 

Is kingly in its heritage of grace. 

Here is but beauty’s wisdom 

In which all trees are wise. 

Trees need not walk the earth

For beauty or for bread; 

Beauty will come to them 

In the rainbow— 

The sunlight— 

And the lilac-haunted rain;

And bread will come to them 

As beauty came: 

In the rainbow— 

In the sunlight— 

In the rain.

This is the fourth Friday of April – Arbor Day. I found this poem when I went looking for something a little less used than Joyce Kilmer’s Trees.  Trees are magnificent things. Aren’t they?  I’m not what you’d call a regular tree hugger, but I have hugged a tree or two in my time, just out of exuberance and a desire to know what it was like to hug a tree.

A trek through the woods in 1992

I remember my oldest granddaughter, Katie, when she was about three years old, staring up at the trees as we walked the trails in our woods. It was a bright, cold day after a snow fall, and the woods were relatively naked.  As she stood and stared up a tree, her grandfather asked her what she was looking at. She replied with a question something like “how come the trees don’t fall over like pencils?”  She didn’t know about roots. That child had, still does have, an inquiring mind.

Inquiring minds want to know.

I really like the trees where we live now. This part of the Carolinas is a transition area, a zone where trees and plants from both northern and southern climates can mix together – everything from maples, oaks, and poplar to pines, pecans, and palmettos.  I recognize old friends, and get to learn more about the trees new to me. 

Not to mention cypress trees and knees