Birch Tree
 
     “But if we stayed home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later.”
     Treebeard, from The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien
 
Along our wooded edge one birch is bent
in half. Instead of reaching for the sky,
it rounds its back, a bough that’s grown awry –
it can’t uncurl, defy, though its intent
must be to straighten up and reinvent
itself as verdant fence or lullaby –
to stand, to shade, to soothe – and not a mayfly,
who dies the day it’s born, no accident
 
but plan, and yet we cannot help but chide
the wind for pushing, pushing by degree,
an enemy we cannot touch or see,
who offers no reprieve, when it is us
who fails to brace his trunk, to pull him wide,
to sing our sweetest song and lift him up.

Marybeth Rua-Larsen

If you have any thoughts about this poem, Marybeth Rua-Larsen   would like to hear them