trees

A Breeze

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

A breeze strums

The feathers of the Scot’s pine

Towering above my garden,

And a wind chime

Gently interprets

Each gust.

There is a magic in the creak

Of the flexing branch

And the twisting sinews

Of fibrous bark;

An instrument

For the wind’s fulfilment.

Always, a dove coos

When I find the wind-full tree

Of my life

Existing in the silence

Of a tangible happening,

Drawing out the now

From its hiding

Until I am like a finely tuned

Sensing apparatus,

Filled with the sticky movement of sap

And vibrating

With the sweet resonance

Of life’s thrill

Through fronds of waxy needles.

Morning Stillness

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

Stillness settled with the night

And did not leave,

And now a windless, blue sky

Brims with spaciousness.

Birds, twittering in the skeletal trees

Dissect the quiet, but not the stillness,

Their tongue’s music

Is the sharp edge

Of reality.

I lean against a wall

Bathed in fresh light.

Things happen in the stillness:

A car passes,

A faraway motorbike on a faraway road,

Blunter than the birds,

A squeal of a refuse truck, ever hungry.

But the stillness remains,

Deeper and more broad

Than the mind can conceive,

Deeper and more broad,

And deeper still.

The tree, standing elegantly tall

Knows the stillness intimately.

It stands beside me, thrumming

With a soundless resonance.

In the patch of sunlight

I lean against the wall,

Listening to the birds,

Knowing that stillness.

Who Is The Leaf?

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

Leaves drawn of their vigour

Yellow in the chill light

And flutter down

With each stroke of the breeze.

–

Dying is a beautiful thing

When life’s sap is safe,

Eternal

In the trunk and the root,

–

Withdrawn from the world

Like an in-breath

Or tide, or season’s

Planetary oscillation.

–

Who grieves the leaf

Its turning or its loosening

On the branch,

Or its earthward mulch

–

Settling into new form?

No one grieves,

For the life in the leaf

Is not gone

–

But hides behind bark,

Gathers against the darkness

Of the shrinking wintery days,

And awaits the pull of the sun

–

And the soil’s warming

And the osmotic urge

To express itself again,

And again, and yet again.

My Friend

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

The Scots pine glows red-skinned

In the morning light.

He is always there,

Watching over my life.

Sometimes he stands out,

As beautiful as beauty itself,

And sometimes he is invisible.

Today, his presence is called

And warbled by the birds

Hopping among his branches.

The breeze too has its say

In the vibration of a myriad needles.

Tree Happening

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

A tree casts its multitude seeds to the world: ‘I give you this,’ it says to life, ‘for you to wear. My children are the footprint in which you tread, the clothes in which the future beds and once again emerges.’

‘All beings are thus: loaded with infinite ways in which life might balance on ‘nows’ narrow path. And by the wayside, the seeds as yet unlocked: not wasted, but the glad price of reality’s weave and weft upon happening’s wide and well trodden map.’

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016