For decades we lived in your world slight, timid creatures scampering about your roots darting up and down your trunk
hopping skittishly between your branches leaping, hovering in your canopy you were almost too large for us to notice as a tree too broad and sky-filling your coarse bark, lobed and leathery leaves shaped the background of our lives embraced by your stalwart thickness,
safe in your shade, shadowed by benevolence, fed by your green and gray, we flourished.
Your roots of virtue wove the ground beneath our feet, sovereigns of our forest, you and your brother, you held together the eternal mountain.
You gave of yourself
your rugged body
tattooed by insects who consumed you in rivulets maps of moss charted your skin generations of robins laid their blue jewels in the crooks of your elbows your acorns filled the bellies of the slender does and their white-starred, frail fawns at your knees, the stags worshiped you with their boughs of bone and glory. Many winters stung your skin as you clung to rock and ice, winds lashed and tore you over the seasons, your thick thumbs gnarled and knobbed your mighty trunk hollowed year by year, imperceptibly you thinned and shriveled weak and emptied, now just your outer edges remain in a sorrowed circle sharp and craggy, bark flaking in dry, papered layers limbs collapsing in moist and reddish peat,
coppered and pungent with age. If only we could welcome our decay lovingly, with branched and open arms since death is a long-awaited guest, if only we could ready ourselves for him crack open our door, at least not barricade ourselves from him, living long lives in our burrows, brimming with fear. Precious oak,
one day your hallowed body will crumble to earth, to clay and loam, new life springing from it – the moss, the mushroom, the meager bud your soul transformed to soil nourishing the next generation. Gardener of us all, how sweetly you tended us how prayerfully, in your deep and quiet way. We mourn the loss of your wholeness your strength and uprightness grieve your withering and hollowing the phloem that once coursed through you vigorously, jubilantly, now desiccates in wood, chipped and jagged collapsing anonymously under the damp litter of leaves.
Life moves on, new creatures stir and quake about you, forgotten, these new little things -- ignorant of your former majesty unknowing that you built them, birthed them, fed them, constructed their sky, invented their air, that to you they owe everything, everything. Yet we knew you, we remember you, you fallen king, you, sweetest of shepherds we honor what you have given us, with a tender reverence, O beloved O father of mine.
