American Elm and Chestnut

An Ode to Pennsylvania Friends of Yore

Feel grief, not pity, shedding tears For American Elms Who once stood here, Alongside Chestnut’s sacred grove, A canopy praising nature’s trove.

I wrongly spurn the present day, While Oak and Aspen flow and sway, Since now is when my memories weep With no time else their ghost to keep.

Where once wind ravished shaking branches, Earth felt roots in quaking trances, Carbon, moisture, forest’s weight, from sky to soil they did partake.

Bid me not forget these Friends From ancient days to recent ends. Fix their visage on my heart. Let their wisdom not depart.

I have beheld no larger life than an American Elm. She towered above four houses, three gardens and a coal tipple in the ecotone where a minor meadow became a small woodland. She welcomed my little self every time I went out the side door of my home on Clover Lane.

Dutch Elm fungus took her down. Men from a tree service dismembered her. A neighbor lady from up the street clucked her tongue. “What a pity losing that tree.”

I had lived too few years to think of a better word than pity. Neither did I yet understand how my way of experiencing a feminine power in nature ran counter to my culture. I remember the loss as the first vacant swath across my heart.

Chestnut leaves filled me with delight. Saplings rose from all the dead trunks in Cook Forest. Sunlight sparkled from thousands of them across the forest floor in early Spring. A fungus struck when they reached adult eye level.

The third stanza of the poem may benefit from a backstory. Pennsylvania is the “Quaker State.” The Chestnut Hill Friends are among those tracing their faith to congregations who trembled during religious experience. They (and I) believe the light of God’s love reaches from Heaven to every open heart.

I hope I conveyed that, when wind shakes a tree, her roots will quake in the soil. Somehow that image fills me with awe. A windstorm pulled up a three-hundred year old Oak at my parents’ property early this millennium. Her root system stood like a wall of hard tentacles next to a crater.

Every tree is born of Earth and Sky. The forest is a fruit of their bond. We mistakenly feel that trees grow heavy by taking nutrients from soil. Almost all of their mass comes from carbon dioxide and rain in the sky.