FALLING
”
Great trees are falling in the forest.
Trees that have protected, stood strong against all things, for decades.
Their trunks covered with rough bark.
Interiors hiding circle after circle, rings of life, telling the history of the years.
Falling.
Thin trunked, supple trees
That for decades have bent with every stiff wind.
Branches laden with snow and ice,
Yet home to nests and fledgling birds who find a safe start from which to fly.
Struck down.
Young, vibrant trees.
Trees with the potential to become mighty oaks,
Or gently weeping willows by the stream.
Trees that have held the potential for great, long lives they now will never see in this forest,
Yet whose sapling shoots nearby may yet survive to see another spring.
Great trees are falling in the forest.
Yet they will live on as firewood for blazes
around which generations will gather to talk of their former glory.
As timber for houses yet to be built.
Rigging for ships of the old and mighty kind,
supporting sails that will roam the seas for new adventures,
discoveries and the joys of seeing home shores again.
As mellowing and rotting humus to nourish the growth of new forests,
new species, unheard of visitors, unseen callers who will come
for the wilderness and the wonder.
To become tent poles for campers. Kitchen spoons for sweet and savory concoctions.
To hold the lead of pencils which will scribble great words onto paper whose pulp they also provide.
To live on.
To live on and on and on.
Yet today our ‘missing’ is monumental, in moments daily and extraordinary.
Not knowing their whisper in the wind.
The crack of their branches as they shake off the winter ice.
The joy of their bud and blossom and new leaves each spring.
So we dwell in the forest, feeling their loss.
The massive, unfillable holes that they leave in the landscape of our hearts
We sit with the emptiness.
Yet we live on.
Knowing that their form has changed.
Has morphed into things both ordinary and yet never to be duplicated.
We live on with the loss
While we love, and remember.
And say prayers of gratitude that we lived in their presence for as long as they stood.
We live on.
Kyle Young
January 20, 2021
So much loss. For me, it started one year ago today when the love of my life slipped away after a dozen years of the ups and downs of cancer. The day he died, the first COVID case was identified in Seattle. And now, one year later, 400,000 Americans have died, and millions more have been sick in degrees from minor illness to major complications.
Today, one year later, we will have a new administration to lead us, whose first formal act was to acknowledge the 400,000 lives we have lost so far. Something that no one had done for the nation before. It brought tears to so many of us. It broke us open in a way that we needed, from the media guest who had lost a good friend only yesterday, to the nurses and doctors who have served at the front, even while under equipped, and overworked with exhaustion.
Lights lined the reflecting pool from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, with the Capital shining white in the distance. Lights which could rightly become a permanent marker of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost too soon.
My emotions are running high, as you might suppose.
Joy as I remember my thirty years of marriage, and good times, and building our family and future.
Weeping as I mourn the loss, but letting the feelings flow through me, trying not to dwell in the sadness. Almost bottomless anger and rage that so many hundreds of thousands have died, when they might have lived.
Gratitude to know that care, and empathy, and honesty is taking over the leadership of our country once again.
Hope for the days to come, which we all know will continue to be hard
“It will get worse before it gets better.” The experts say. “These are dark months.”
But I can begin to see the light.
For myself.
For my family and friends who are family.
For our country, and yes, for our world
So as I’ve lived with this range of feelings, these words came to me.
My response to this anniversary of one leaving, and one coming. And too many lost too soon.
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