AGAIN the oak, bare, stripped and barren, brings
More confirmation to the heart than Spring’s
Returning green; more courage to refind
The winter-bones of spirit unobscured
By summer-flesh of leaves. The troubled mind
After the Fall’s deception, reassured —
After the wind, after the winter storm —
By deep return to discipline of form.
What power hidden in the winter tree
Can set the captive spirit running free,
Following flight of trunk and leap of limb,
Singing through fountain of the branch a hymn,
Spilling through laughter of the twigs in flight
Out to the limitless expanse of light?
Does mortal eye, so trained by mortal frame,
Find in the trees’ uplifted boughs the same
Gesture of supplication or of praise
We mortals use, when mortal arms we raise?
Or does the adult mind, remembering
The child’s conception of the sky, still cling
To images of God who sits on high?
(We too might reach Him, could we touch the sky!)
Or does the startled spirit recognize
A deeper kinship that the mind denies,
Within the skeletal form of tree concealed,
Symbol of its own struggle find revealed:
A form so contrapuntal and yet pure;
The chosen path, fortuitous, yet sure;
The thrust, the spread, the lift, apparently
So free, and yet tap-rooted in the ground;
The shape, an individual, yet bound
By its generic law: it is a tree.
Does spirit see — even recall, somehow,
The tortured path that’s taken by the bough,
Remember as its own, no need to learn,
Each thrust and block and compensating turn
The sap must make in its slow odyssey,
Journey from trunk to twig, from earth to sky?
And does the pattern here not clarify,
Perceived at last in its entirety,
A confirmation of essential trend;
Assurance that the tree does in the end,
In its slow pilgrimage from root to flower,
Pulsing with all of sap’s blind, patient power —
Power of faith, of prayer, of prophecy —
Reach in the polar buds the open sky?