Oak and Willow

We have grown this way together,
watching continents slow scatter.
No more do we take heed the senescence.
Stationary growth, vivacious passions long lost art.
We grow so close together, we only ever grow apart.
Bear witness as the world sheds skin of innocence.

We share the weight: new wedding rings each year within our boughs.
Romantic is the wind as through our leaves, utters our vows.

Willow, will you marry me? The answer; always ‘yes’.
But every year, tradition fades to less and less and less.

Rootedly, we synchronize as ground beneath us shifts.
Reaching outward hopelessly, we watch each other drift.

Every season, every drought,
some with reason, some without.
Something bites as hard as bark
to seize the night, we listen, hark.
”I love you” We whisper.
Nothing more.

Every spring, a thousand years, a marriage, and then suddenly;
an axe, a bang, a union ceased so savagely and saddening.
Suffered we the wrath of man, their industrial vocation.
Missing more than love, gone now a partner and a fellow.
Now a lonely hillside stands an Oak without a Willow.
Maybe passion since had died, but still lived: adoration.

And I, the Oak, am waiting here with limbs stretched to the sky.
I wonder how it happened, Willow, where you’ve left, and why?

All these extra rings to share will wait within my boughs
and never more bear utterance to faithful wedding vows.

Some days when the wind blows hard, I moan because you’ve gone,
but as it eases, so do I accept that you’ve moved on.

Every season, every drought,
some with reason, some without.
Something bites as hard as bark
to seize the night, we listen, hark.
”I miss you” I whisper.
Nothing more.