I, too, wish to confer with the flowers.
I, too, wish to consult with the rain,
but I have spent so many years
learning that I’ve lost the ability
to speak and listen in these natural tongues.
Today I sat beside an old spruce tree
for an hour and never understood
what it had to tell me. I tried.
Perhaps that is the problem, the trying.
I don’t know how to do it any other way.
Oh Scarecrow, I know too much.
Me and all my certainties. I’ve made walls
out of what I took as wisdom, and now
I cannot see around them. I made
stories out of facts and histories, and now
I cannot hear the spruce. I can barely
hear my own wild heart as it shouts
in some strange language I have
filed away or perhaps I never knew?
Oh this brain, how it costumes
everything else into terms of risks,
probabilities and rules.
How I long to listen clearly
to the flowers, to the rain,
to my heart, to the spruce.
