The Wishing Woods

VERY old are the woods
And the buds that break
Out of the briar's boughs,
So old with their beauty are--
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.
Very old are the brooks
And the rills that rise
Where snow sleeps cold beneath
The azure skies
Sing such a history
Of come and gone
Their every drop is as wise
As Solomon.
Very old are we men;
Our dreams are tales
Told in dim Eden
By Eve's nightingales;
We wake and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of amaranth lie.

(Personal note: A very long time ago, I went into a forest on a day trip and saw a tree with objects tied to it. The tree was tall and I did not know how these small objects, which looked to be letters and amulets of some kind, could have been attached to the limbs without ladders and so forth. It was a profound image and it stuck with me all these years. I called it the wishing tree, for later I discovered that most of the objects were wishes and objects left for prayers and so forth. I've always wanted to go back to that place and this last month I was told that the tree still stood but all the wishes were long gone. I thought about that and it seemed fitting, for very old is the world and it is passing through time and all of us will soon be dim tales. Those thoughts are from one of my favorite poems, this poem by Walter de la Mare called All That's Past. I first saw it in an Anthropology class when I was a young girl. This is a photo of The Great Merrible Forest in England, one of the few ancient forest in that country. I like the thought of it, Wishing Woods, an ancient forest full of trees with a thousands wishes left behind by human thought. This is the world we live in, simply put. I'll see you all in March! Blessings.)