I Summer 1998 <br /> <br />Cottonwood, <br />great rooted one, <br />leafy priest of our woodland church, <br />you sway in the blue air near your brother trees. <br />You are the center of every labyrinth. <br />You are a message piercing the sky's silence. <br />You are time's sentinel and nature's witness. <br /> <br />Six decades of growth have swelled your girth. <br />Five of us linking hands can barely circle you. <br />Wind and weather have scored deep fissures in your bark. <br />Its roughness is like flesh hardened by work. <br /> <br />Your branches make a green canopy over grass and dirt. <br />Shadows shelter us and cousin birds and deer. <br />You listen deeply to the sounds of everything alive. <br /> <br />II Summer 1999 <br /> <br />Lost cottonwood, <br />shattered great one, <br />dead fragment of your giant life, <br />six decades of growth against one night of destruction. <br />Your hollow stump is rotted, exposed to the furies of wind <br /> and weather. <br />Your death was as sudden as your life was slow. <br /> <br />We gather around your base, caretakers of your end. <br />Lichen still carpet your bark, <br />moss shines brightly after June rains, <br />green plants, yellow with new growth, sprout from your <br /> pale fibers. <br />You cannot be finally dead if living things grow out of you. <br />You live again through them, through us. <br />We celebrate tonight, in light and in darkness, <br />your life, your death, your afterlife.<br /><br />Daniel Brick<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ode-to-a-cottonwood-stump/
