All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, <br />Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil. <br />Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, <br />And the sky above us stayed the dull gray <br />Of an old year coming to an end. <br /> <br />In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son's birth-- <br />An olive or a fig tree--a sign that the earth has one more life to bear. <br />I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father's orchard, <br />A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, <br />A promise of new fruit in other autumns. <br /> <br />But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant, <br />Defying the practical custom of our fathers, <br />Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord, <br />All that remains above earth of a first-born son, <br />A few stray atoms brought back to the elements. <br /> <br />We will give you what we can--our labor and our soil, <br />Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail, <br />Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees. <br />We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light, <br />A slender shoot against the sunset. <br /> <br />And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead, <br />Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down, <br />His mother's beauty ashes in the air, <br />I want you to stand among strangers, all young and emphemeral to you, <br />Silently keeping the secret of your birth.<br /><br />Dana Gioia<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/planting-a-sequoia/
