The Talking Trees Poem by Daniel Brick

Every tree in the countryside spoke to me, saying,
HOLY! HOLY! In the forest, enchantment...
Who can express all of it?
Ludwig van Beethoven,1815

The trees will not speak to me.
Their branches bend toward the earth.
They are heavy with water, from three days
of rain. Water drops fall from their leaves
to the already saturated grasses. Perhaps
trees and grasses stretch toward each other
to form a wet green union, a blending
of their identities as growing things
that do not move from place to place,
but exult in their stationary perfection.

In the dappled morning light, I loiter
between two maple trees, wondering
which one will take notice of me, and
answer my greeting with its own kind of
salutation. The sun rises higher in the sky.
No answering gesture happens. But a breeze
grazes my face and no doubt receives some
answering gesture from the leaves of both
maples. I am a witness to this exchange,
my hope is to be a participant in it.

Do the trees have any sense of effort?
Do they feel the movement of sap
through all their branches and leaves
as a worthy effort that makes them
swell with success? Or are they
simply living things in which a process
perpetually occurs, with no sense of time,
no awareness of what must be. Their existence
contains no thought, no strain: in idleness
they achieve everything in perfect sync.

If the trees could read my mind,
if they could register my feelings
for them, they would acknowledge me
in some vegetative way, some offering
of their being, maybe a cluster of leaves
falling in my path, maybe a silent gesture
of branches conveyed as the wind swept
through the tree on its mission elsewhere.
Or perhaps the tree's soul would speak
directly to my soul, meaning HOLY! HOLY!