This summer I'm hanging around at and learning from a nonprofit called CDF: A Collective Action Initiative. The organization does community development work in the city of Clarkston, where so many of the refugee families I worked with last year live (I think they're pretty awesome-- check them out at cdfaction.org). Yesterday my supervisor and I had a walk-meeting on the Beltway, a path which winds right around the office. Struck by the fruit trees growing wildly along the way, he shared with me a story about a tree that taught him much about God. The poem below was inspired by his words.
How dares the tree to grow so free,
so bold and resolute?
Risking to plunge up from the ground,
reaching out beyond its root.
If you listen, you’ll hear the tree declare
Soft, yet defiantly,
“Gravity, of you I’m not afraid—
you have no hold on me.I choose to grow up
and up and up
until I reach the sky.
Strong and resilient I shall be;
your rules do not apply.”
But does the brave tree know, I muse, the suffering that's
in store?
There’ll be plucking and pruning, dismembering too,and yet whatever for?
To make it "productive," "domestic," "pretty," and
"tame"
And oh yes, to make space
for a set of electrical wires to cut the sky
like raw scars across a face.the most compelling and lovely of trees
And even the sturdiest of oaks
are not immune to heavy breeze.
Yes even the wind, the precious wind,
who soothes creation with her breath,
has been known to wreak havoc on wooded folk
Whispering, To live is to face death.
Does the tree know?
Oh has it heard, how hard it will have to strive?
How humans will expect it to change every fall
and every springtime to make fruit arrive?I wondered and wondered to myself
till at last I went to the source:
Oh Tree, I asked, did you know?
Great Tree replied, Of course.
the earthworms, about pain.
The buried trash around me foretold
how the world can be insane.
But still I risked and dared to grow,
ever moving towards the sun.
You see, that’s what I was made to do—Like you, oh Little One.
