the community of life

 All Connected

every living thing has its time to be,
and then it’s time to not be,
countless stories thrive all around us,
and we do not, or cannot, hear them,

I love trees, for their story can be brash and loud,
they can endure for hundreds of years
and shout at least a piece of their stories,
I love that we are discovering a community in the soil
that remembers, that acts,
that holds all together,
as if the ephemerals of spring
and the grandparents of old growth
are a community that includes
the brashly slow lichen the rock,
the sudden mushroom, Indian pipe
who burst from the ground,
the myriad bushes, vines, trees,

our human lives are but the temporary clothes
the world wears for our days
and then we are gone
and fashions change,

I love history, how my ancestors, my people,
lived their lives and worked to make sense of it all,
how those not in the chain that leads to me lived,

I want to know the stories of the rock and of the leaf,
and of the Indigenous peoples who also loved this land,
and did their best to figure out who they were
and express it well with how they lived,

the natural world knew them
and it knows us,
will any of our stories be worth honoring,
or even worth remembering,
by the tree
by the lichen,
by the mycelli,
by our mammal cousins,
by all the cousins that life gives us?

 

by Henry Walker
6/25/24