“But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and hart beating.”
– Lawrence Hill
I have long sat here.
In this decaying garden I rest.
My thick branches reach out into the sky like long fingers.
Roots deeply set into the ground I have observed this garden for centuries;
I have watched ghosts walk among these rotting pathways and have long observed the slow decay of humanity.
It had once been the definition of heavenly grace;
The garden a straight emulation of Eden its self.
Roses had once lined the great stone walls, and thick lush ivy grew on the heavy stones.
The air was filled with the sweet scents of wild poppies and tiger lily.
Filled to the brim with vibrant colours it was a kaleidoscope of oranges and deep blues and reds.
In the center of it all was me.
My long branches stood tall with lush green leaves and white apple blossom.
My long roots healthy and full of life.
I had been beautiful.
The sun had once shone down through my branches
It had given life to everything that once used to be here.
The sun would rise from his slumber and make his lazy journey across the sky;
giving the day a warm glow.
The insects would hum with joy and the flowering plants would bloom in bright bursts of life.
One morning the sun did not return from his slumber and the sky turned grey.
The garden was left in an eternal shadow of grey.
As the years went by the garden started to die.
Its soil turned poisonous and dead, and no longer could it nourish life.
I too became weak and slowly my leaves wilted off and turned to dust on the ground below.
The roses have long died and now long weeds line the decaying stone walls.
Lost to it’s colour and vibrancy.
All that remains now is the brownish hue of death and decay.
I will here alone in this tomb of shadows growing weaker and weaker
until I too turn into a pile of dust and ash,
and wither away within this tomb of decay.
I wrote this poem during one of our classes when we were responding to the quote above written by Lawrence Hill. I got the idea of the first line of the poem from the first sentence of the quote. I have always been fascinated by the amount of history trees hold and wanted to write a poem in perspective of a great old tree so I tried implementing that idea in this post. In this poem I wanted to discuss the progression a person under goes when faced with loneliness. The tree is supposed to represent the individual and the garden around it is their mental health. I think loneliness can have such a profound impact on people it can drive some to completely shut themselves of from the the world and become bitter and angry, while some others just become desperate for some human connection and become sad and isolated due to the lack of connection. I highlighted this second response to loneliness by the soil becoming poisonous and the tree growing weak from the lack of nutrient. I think poem I might want to come back to in the future to re-explore this idea.
