I Love a Tree
By: Gerhard Emanuel
Frost
I have a love
affair,
a very private
thing,
with one
familiar oak.
It grows ten
paces from our door,
massive and
strong and tall.
This tree
comforts and encourages,
calls to me as
I leave for my next class:
“If I can grow
from a buried acorn,
forgotten by
one absentminded squirrel,
perhaps you,
too, an absentminded professor,
may say
something today, and then forget,
something that
may plant an oak
in the forests
of humanity.”
So, I believe
in acorns;
this is part
of my teacher’s creed.
Unique among our
trees,
this oak speaks.
It speaks of
power and age,
and deep, deep
roots;
but, most of
all, it tells of suffering,
in its most
stark and visible feature:
no major
branch grows toward the east!
In some harsh
moment of a long and testing past
my tree has
felt disaster,
such force of
tragedy that it must live its years
without the slightest
symmetry.
Distorted,
bent, unyielding in every wind
it wrenches at
its roots,
but holds and
stands to greet the dying winds
that mark the
end of the storm.
This special tree,
I name it Job.
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