(Un)Rooted
Finding my way
While I was processing this poem, I read School of Blue‘s poem Rubble of words / grief, loss where he wrote: We feel the rumble of universal pain. Then Bill Schmidt shared, elsewhere, a quote from Carson McCullers: “we are homesick most for the places we have never known” and suggested this is due to the rootlessness of modern/post modern culture. I love how the thoughts and poems of others join with my own ponderings to become a poem.
(Un)Rooted
I walk among the trees
These tall creatures
Rooted in place
I rely on their steadiness
Where they are
Solid and secure
We are an unrooted species
moving from place to place
from sight to sight
from thought to thought
Experts at distraction
In a moment of presence
I savoured a piece of Gouda
Read the words Made in Holland
My taste finding root in the cheese
of my grandmothers and fathers
far away in space and time
For a brief moment
the unremembered past became present
We are unrooted
Words keep us in our heads
while the pain of the world
is ringing in our ears
A pain so universal
Searing, unfathomable
Intolerable
We stay up there
in our heads
The ringing a dull roar
I walk among the trees
Scan the branches
The space between
The eyes in my head
Keep me focused
I stop
Lean against a tree
Close my eyes
Even as my dog’s whine
begging me to follow scents
calls me away
I breathe deep
Pressed to the tree
Keep breathing
My dog will alert me to danger
I consider the tree’s roots
going down into the earth
Follow them
as I breathe
My own consciousness
reaches into Earth
draws from her life-blood
Water flows into my veins
Iron binds and strengthens
Not extracted but freely given
Her creative energy
fills and sustains me
Without Earth I am nothing
A weak, empty shell
A ghost gliding across a barren landscape
Without ground
Unmoored
Leaning against the tree
Feet planted on the soil
I am rooted
in the Mother of us all
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Beautiful and poignant, Trish. My ancestors are also from Holland, so I resonated with the specificity of that detail—though as you capture, we all share a kind of longing for “roots.” Thanks for posting.
The theme is something I think about often. North Americans have a particular rootlessness, you mentioned your Dutch ancestors and I often feel a similar unremembered connection to my Irish or German ancestors I know nothing about but sense through what I imaged they did or thought. Trees are such wonderful metaphors and teachers, you're paying attention to what they have to teach us, it's a joy to witness