Ode To A Cottonwood Stump

I Summer 1998 Cottonwood, great rooted one, leafy priest of our woodland church, you sway in the blue air near your brother trees. You are the center of every labyrinth. You are a message piercing the sky's silence. You are time's sentinel and nature's witness. Six decades of growth have swelled your girth. Five of us linking hands can barely circle you. Wind and weather have scored deep fissures in your bark. Its roughness is like flesh hardened by work. Your branches make a green canopy over grass and dirt. Shadows shelter us and cousin birds and deer. You listen deeply to the sounds of everything alive. II Summer 1999 Lost cottonwood, shattered great one, dead fragment of your giant life, six decades of growth against one night of destruction. Your hollow stump is rotted, exposed to the furies of wind and weather. Your death was as sudden as your life was slow. We gather around your base, caretakers of your end. Lichen still carpet your bark, moss shines brightly after June rains, green plants, yellow with new growth, sprout from your pale fibers. You cannot be finally dead if living things grow out of you. You live again through them, through us. We celebrate tonight, in light and in darkness, your life, your death, your afterlife.