They look as trees

Not merely nude

For autumn’s breeze

But dead and crude,

To ne’er again in color dress

Or lend their shade to the abbess;

Does here the sun no longer shine,

Letting clothes not even to pine?

Has the ground itself gone rot?

But what of God’s stony cot?

What dirt of health is so looted

That even dies what’s not rooted?

Perhaps a curse and not disease

Spelt death for the oak trees,

And drove the clerics far away,

May yet perturb them to this day.

Nay, my fancies about its demise

Are fanciful just as its birth,

Both beheld by eager eyes,

Which see things not upon the earth;

But, why should we wonder so stern

The only thing we ever learn—

That, friary or peasant hut,

All doors someday forever shut?

Though, the abbey as a house of God

Seems time there should never maraud,

But, if ruin becomes the old oak tree

Why not also monastery?

If you please,

God hath made those strong oak trees,

And man the frail monasteries.

Yet, still—we might hope for some permanence,

If only in God’s holy tents;

But time and nature take as same

Both the church and birch in name,

Which surely is not fit for blame,

Nor of man’s spiteful shame;

The only diff’rence twixt in death

Is that the trees once had a breath—

Why mourn thee coffin and not corpse,

Or the plume and not the bird,

As if the hand of man once warps

The dead to life with but a word,

Thinking his spirit does imbue

Whate’er he makes in lively hue?

But, no, his work’s of clay and stone

That no breath of life e’er in blown,

Or unto by the warm sun shown,

Can e’er make life thence unknown.

Grieve not creations of the creature,

Which by fancy have their feature,

As holy books clerics applaud

If, rewritten, describe another god,

Since man be destined death’s grim door,

Why thinks his creatures to endure?

Best to cherish truer fruits

Than man’s sour, rotten disputes;

Best to bypass monast’ries

And, instead, grieve the great oak trees.

-Poyetikos