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The Peace Giver
A Prose Poem; a meditation
The Peace-Giver
The trees are talking silently, their roots extended through hyphae in to mycelium, netted hammocks voicing songs of soil and water, deep green softness of the cypress needles brushing air into neighboring branches, twigs extended in waving motions, greeting my footsteps as I touch the peeling bark. This tree has seen decades of seasons, turns of the earth under stars, been sought for the peace it emits as one sits below its shade in the dappling darkness.
We may call the tree the Peace-Giver, but we don’t know this tree absorbs our sorrows, holds them in the rings of its trunk as it grows, keeps our anger and anxiety held in sturdy plant cell walls safely away from our tender moldable hearts, our scarred and blood-filled skin. We don’t know the tree calls itself the Sorrowful One, bends in the wind from the weight of its burden.
If we were to view the landscape from the height of this ancient cypress, we would see a crumbling white brick wall atop a hill on the other side of the forest. As the sun rises, light plays through a stain-glass window set within this wall, depicting the tree as a seedling. Once this wall was a sanctuary that held the souls who planted the Peace Giver, knew it as a young carefree sapling. When it looks at the stained glass, colors of bright green and…
