Sequoia

(Poem included in the Poems of Yosemite chapbook.) Ineffable – Still, I write these lines trite. A scaffold of words which whence removed casts only a silence of long shadows. To you, the paradigm of living time, I write ephemeral wordless words. You say nothing though the wind wafts words which speak beyond words to each. The sound of wind continues in the stillness and reaches into the logos which spells the visitors deeper than these. You speak centuries – the entire time of our adolescence – when you’ve watched as we wrestle with the worst of nature. You were made for fire and your cambium grows thick bark and fibers over the scars. Does too our tissue grow over scars? Wars, devastations? Will these as well clear the understory? But you don’t create fire you endure it. Is that the difference? This is your nature, share and compare us ours. We see your exposed rings and the markers telling us which ring belongs to Christ and the Inquisition. I see my ring but not the current as only the living scribe those rings and they are being written. Poetry overcomes time and endows the ephemeral with permanence. Your permanence is presence and in this silence of time the visitors sense then understand – they’ve come not to see you but themselves.