Severien Meyer - I Was Once A Tree

I Was Once A Tree
(By: S. Meyer) 1999

As a seedling tree
All growth was possible.
My juices flowed rapidly
As the warm Spring days
And cool nights,
Awakened me to the reaches waiting above.

I don’t perceive time.
In fact, I don’t perceive,
The way the moving two-legged creatures do.
I do not really see them,
But sense their being, and at times,
Their love for me;
Their fear, their ambivilence, their neglect.

My growth is slow.
Concentric circles of woody mass
Eventually give me girth,
And stately height.
I become beautiful symmetry,
A branched column of nobility.
I do not perceive nobility, nor symmetry,
But the two-legged ones surely must.

Then, in the throws of my greatest majesty,
I am changed.
The two-legged ones,
In a matter of moments,
Take my growth.

The years to maturity,
Through dormant winters,
Vibrant Springs,
Sweltering Summers.
And Brilliant Falls,
Are toppled quickly to the ground
As the after-effect of savage butchery.

Gone are my Winter silhouette,
My shading limbs.
The grandeur which can only be known
From without.


I cannot hear their saws,
Nor sense their reason.
But deep below my cambium layer,
In the recesses of my wooden heart,
I know that I am changed...
Much for the worse,
And... my ultimate demise.

Severien Meyer

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