Grieving and restless
I leave before breakfast
and recklessly cross
the new eight-lane highway

By way of the old house
unsettled by sold ghosts
I turn where the freight trains
once rattled and rolled

Wild overgrown woods,
my soul leaps for childhood,
and jumps the tracks back
to those warm leafy days

The trees and your face
and the safety and sunlight,
a longing as long
as my arms can embrace

I enter the clearing
and sense I am nearing
the center, the core,
the wound from the first war:

Will you be under the tree, rooting for me?

---

Child of my own
he is far from all grown
with his limbs like the limbs
of this young apple tree

He climbs up it slowly
my worry his gravity
eyes where the jet planes
make trails in the sky

Don't fly yet! Pain's threat
has me fearful and petty,
not ready to join
in your wild cheerful fun

You reach for life's fruit
while I stand stooped and stunted,
and haunted by death
though your life's just begun

You look down at me
from your place in the tree
and ask where I will be
so I tell you what’s true:

I'll be underneath the tree, rooting for you.

---

Their lives were like leaves,
on a branch in the trees,
each with only a season
to dance on the breeze

But they spread out in families,
we’re under their canopy -
from Maine to the Great Plains
they scattered their seed

Their story’s the source
of our brains and our bodies
The course of their lives
courses live in our veins

They speak in our dreams
and peer out from our mirrors
Our features are teachers
that something remains

I kneel by the tree
and in tears I will trust
that the world needs the seed
and the leaf and the dust -

And they’ll be underneath the tree, rooting for us.