a poet once said that leaves are the tears of trees,
an image so beautiful, so moving I wept until tears streamed
onto my chest and I could not stop so sure was I that leaves are
the tears of trees --- bound frozen paralyzed by the horrors
they have seen, unable to disgorge their watery burden,
discharge their salt-laden fronds, silent spectators to eons
of brutal truths, mute informants, wordless witnesses
to every cruelty the heart can abide:
women burned at the stake, pinioned in earthy infernos proclaiming
piety, wracked in terrestrial hell, men drawn and quartered, loose limbs,
flailing heads, severed, pitilessly piked, paraded in the name of a loving God
…. a loving god… holy be he
for what?
for being witches, heretics, dissidents
native americans decimated tribe-by-tribe, bison butchered, shot for sport,
starving red men red with their own blood, driven from sacred lands on
trails of tears, quartered on parched profane reservations dying
in penury and destitution
for what?
to build our shining city on a hill…long may it shine
two centuries of black slavery in searing southern sun, king cotton crushing
spirits, families uprooted, sold and separated, mother from child, father from
wife, brutal beatings, chokeberry trees planted pitilessly on black backs, trees bending
with black bodies, a brutal war brother against brother birthing its bastard,
ever-transformed, reconstructed but never-quite-dying Jim Crow
for what?
for profit, a lifestyle, domination
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, a hundred thousand cremated in a flaming instant
more intense than all the pyres of all the witches in history, those decimated
dead the lucky ones, escaping the terrible torment of radioactive poisoning,
lesions cancers….
for what?
to end a terrible war, yes, but the hundred thousand were civilians… innocents
six million dead in the holocaust, crammed in cattle cars, gassed, shot in the
head, left to rot on the roadside, women and children thrown still alive
into lime pits to die in agony, others to starve in the camps, perish of typhus
and a dozen other plagues.
for what?
for their faith in the wrong god….the wrong god.
all this the trees have witnessed.
If ever their leaves should melt thaw
resolve themselves into real tears,
what a flood there would be.
What a deluge.
David Blumenfeld (a.k.a. Dean Flowerfield) is a retired philosophy professor and associate dean who resumed writing stories and poetry after a more than 40-year break. Since 2022, he has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; one of his stories received a “notable essay” mention in The Best American Essays, 2022; ten of his works were finalists or received high praise in literary competitions, including one of his pieces that appeared in Best American Haiku, 2023. Davidcblumenfeld.com