No one can convince me
that the oak has no memory.
Whenever I’m willing to listen,
it reminisces about winds
that shook its confidence
before I was born,
saturating rains I can’t imagine,
and droughts worse than this one.
The trick is to translate
murmurs and creaks of sap and solid wood
into dialects of blood and bone,
the cackling of neurons we call thought.
But the birds gossiping among its leaves
have no interest
in how much time it took
or what the oak had to endure
to make the shade
that shelters them in the hot afternoon.
Now will always be enough for them.
*