Syncopated Joy

Syncopated Joy
 
Trees migrate. 
It takes decades, but forests are
on the move and humans barely
register their amazing wanderings. 
 
Can you hear them sing? 
Can you hear them raise voice,
orchestrate their canopies in
splendid wonder?
Glory!
Glory!
 
Overstories sway inside lower winds.
Understories seldom feel a thing from
wind, but down there, down just up
from the forest’s floor ~ that’s where the
low, hushed hum begins; escalating as it
moves up through the trees, shivering
limbs awake.  A call to arms.
Arms reach up, up, UP! 
 
Up, and up and up and into an indigo sky,
vibrating with stars singing night alive!
Night syncopates* toward dawn, dawn
gently chants aloft the tree’s overstory,
bidding those burnished upper limbs: join the
choral.  Drown within her brightening!
Sing!
SING!
 
Undulating upward: up from lush loamy floors,
up through roping light piercing through
leaf filled boughs, up through scattered old
bones of each tree, UP the hums swirl gathering
momentum until, at long last, each hum
bursts forth into the forest, joins, stretches wide,
breaks joy’s earthly plane with a sonorous
melody quite unlike any other and one which
demands human ears STOP and listen, even
if what we hear defies possibility and simply
echoes into the realm of “Do you hear that?”.
 
Stopping, I tilt an ear upward. Yes. I. Hear. That.
The forest’s refrain enters every cell of my body
and rides each to its core: ribosomes dance!
Flesh ripples, hairs jump upright, heart quivers.
Notes cant skyward, careening on a passing wind
leveraging themselves against the silence.
Undersong, melody, refrain, phrase, theme, all
interlaced, as in the entwining of the forest’s limbs:
singular, reaching, united as one note hums within
another.  Understory, overstory, otherstory:
THERE, resisting silence, THERE, SING!
SING!
 
Later the trees exhale a communal sigh,
demanding they quiet and rest.  A palpable
shudder ripples across the detritus, into the
sapling’s heart and around all the trees: primeval
heartwood or recent births ~ all.  Night wanders.
I wonder.
 
Why don’t humans have dozens of words for “tree”?
 
 


*shortens, shrinks
 
by Barbara Helvey Hughes, 2020