Avenue of the Oaks
By Darrell Petska
PROMPT — The way I see it ...
Trees have lives we can only imagine. In awe I tarry beneath these green-blushing oaks bathing in sunny warmth—and wonder, this profligate spring day, whether such venerable giants might sense some glimmering déjà vu: have I lived this life before? How irreal, almost dreamlike, might it feel as they awaken to their sudden enormity? Does the feeling stir within them like an acorn wanting to sprout? Can they sense in their waxing and waning an enduring, avataristic linkage to the sun, or conversely, only a fleeting life arc as their roots interact with whatever experience field weeds around them might hold? Change surely churns within them each moment, their faces a shifting register of light and heat, wind, rain and chill. Perhaps leaf fall and autumnal senescence erase cellular memory or bury it deep in dream. In the trees’ spring rush to greening, only sky and earth qualify to answer: am I old, am I new, what is my history? Do trees, in their own inscrutable ways, as we humans in ours, ponder questions that ultimately little matter? Because all we have, all we know, is our present moment, uncertain breezes ruffling each of us as we sleep and awaken to our lives.
Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry appears in Verse-Virtual, Soul Poetry, Prose & Arts Magazine, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Orchards Poetry Journal, and widely elsewhere (conservancies.wordpress.com). Father of five and grandfather of seven, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife of more than 50 years.
