The Dancing Tree

Crow flapped under the boughs of a creaking oak Sensing something unusual was going to happen. The oak had recently felt the urge to uproot Deciding that it was darkened by its own shadow Its branches hung horizontal, a gallows tree The remains of the dying sun bled through its twigs Spring pressed against its sides like a young fire It seemed its roots had troweled aeons of midnights It was nailed to its birth-spot, girning So many hours of gravity! So many anguished whimpers of fading leaves Drifting into the empty rooms of the woods! The past was a dead weight, a hard tethering. People remember flowers Like lovers’ promises on paths of kisses Oak, knew only bitter and biting breezes The weary sameness of weighty treadmill seasons On tight-rope winds birds swung into the heavens Children, green and pulsing, ran barefoot Out of the ken of trees and parents A malcontent miser, the oak Counted its pennies of wrongs. And so, with storm clouds brothing, Thunder, lining the horizon Oak twisted its roots out of reason Out of the mulch and withering that was its life. On the woody stumps of its feet It left its familiar boundaries, Hobbled its way past the smoke of hidden cottages In the moonlight, it swayed and rocked In the moaning wind, a sawdust dancer, it sighed Free of its knotty shackles, it tasted newness Crow cocked his weird head side-ways Stunned on by strange behaviour Beak agape at such unnatural practises