The Woods

Walk with me along a dusty deer trail, under the morning sun, amidst the orange tinted mist beside towering pine and sycamore trees, and between gnarled oaks with wrinkled skin. Listen to the Woodpeckers tapping their mysterious messages on twisted limbs and Blue Jays cackling their self-important songs to the blue ribboned brook creeping leisurely through a flowered lea, gurgling softly at frogs croaking their somber songs, lazing along its sides.

Twisted oak limbs, casualties of winter’s winds, lingering alongside the trail next to fallen rocks, provide a resting place for small birds so they can sing their spring sing-songs to the wind with their sweet voices, while the sun’s beams bounce off boulders sending a rosy warmth into their downy feathers. The morning’s hushed voice echoes down to the valley below where the mist embalms a vision of a long dead lumberjack’s axe slicing into the trunk of a tree.

A raven high in a sycamore tree sends its cawing message to me telling me to save all these visions in my mind to awaken some day in my life when I can no longer walk the dusty trails in these verdant woods. A time when my bones become as brittle as fallen oak limbs, and my mind becomes as rusty as the old axe which still lies deep in the earthy loam where the lumberjack left it decades ago after the forest burned and countless years were needed to renew the trees and shrubberies, which now gave wings to my memories.

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James G. Piatt  is a pushcart and best of web nominee, and many of his poems were selected for inclusion in The 100 Best Poems of 2016, 2015 & 2014 Anthologies. He has published 3 collections of poetry,  The Silent Pond (2012), Ancient Rhythms, (2014),and  LIGHT, (2016), and 980 poems, in over 135 magazines, anthologies, and books. His fourth collection of poetry will be released this year.