{"id":1613,"date":"2023-03-14T13:00:51","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T17:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-poem-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-03-14T13:00:51","modified_gmt":"2023-03-14T17:00:51","slug":"a-poem-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-poem-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"A Poem \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

We see ourselves in them<\/a>. We lean on them for lessons on how to be more human<\/a> and what resilience means<\/a>. They are our timekeepers<\/a>, our spiritual guides<\/a>, our kin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I spend a great deal of time in an old-growth forest awned by trees older than me by centuries. Trees beneath which thousands of other humans have walked on feet that are no more, carrying their sorrows and their dreams in hearts that are now soil. Trees that have witnessed world wars and weddings, that have been growing since before we built the bomb and decoded the human genome, before Einstein dreamt up relativity and Nina Simone dreamt up \u201cMississippi Goddam,\u201d some of them alive when Bach was alive.<\/p>\n

I often wonder what they would say if they could speak. But perhaps they would say nothing at all \u2014 perhaps they would speak a truth beyond words.<\/p>\n

That is what poet Dorianne Laux<\/strong> intimates in her lovely poem \u201cThe Life of Trees,\u201d found in her collection Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) and read here to the sound of cellist and composer Zo\u00eb Keating\u2019s piece \u201cOptimist\u201d from her transcendent record Into the Trees<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n