Let your Sap fall to the Roots

Let your Sap fall to the Roots

“Let your sap fall to the roots!”

The Arborist lifts his voice

To the tree pumping all its fluid energy

To each extremity, pushing - pressing.

Dormancy makes it demands

Like a hooded Undertaker,

Only this seasoned hibernation

Is fateful, not fatal.

Though both close the eye,

Sleep is not death.

But sleep emulates death

As rest imitates fainting 

So the fruitful kick against its goads

Codependent with buds and leaves and fruit,

For what is a tree if it doesn’t produce?

Standing dead wood.

The sap senses the drop in temperature

It’s not blind to the shrinking sunlight.

But the corked chlorophyll doesn’t lie

Leaves know they’re going to die

Everything from within and without

Is joining the voice of the Arborist,

“Let your sap fall to the roots!”

It’s only a matter of time.

We know we’re deciduous creations

Trying to live a coniferous existence,

Some years we find greenhouses

To fool ourselves into skipping a season

Dying to be evergreen, we rebel.

But life doesn’t lie

And every year the winter whispers within

“Let your sap fall to the roots.

It’s for your own good, trust me.”

This quarter-season of quiescence 

Promises the sublime in the supine,

While the other three quarters screams, “Undertaker!”

Yet taken under I find sprawling branches below,

Waiting-welcoming like old forgotten friends,

Needing the same sap to grow

Leaving behind the bole and bough

With barked braches once blossoming

This dark world is even more alive,

Buried, though far from dead.

As I let the falling of Fall have its way

Allowing gravity to finally draw me under,

The sleep-season above ground sends

Sap to the tap, a root plunged

So deep and dark it’s scary at first.

But, oh, the comfort of being wrapped up

In the strength and depth of age-old friends

This savage sage of the underworld

Who needs no recognition for its contribution

nor is it beholden to the drug of being beheld,

more alive in its life that all that looks alive

to the naked eye deceived by appearances.

Within its bosom I find sweet rest

Sapped of life I become myself again

Until what sounded like a tongue-lashing 

becomes a lullaby sung by the swaying Arborist,

“Let your sap fall to the roots.”

In time I will come to the surface again, 

But only when it’s time, and not a moment before.

I will serve the extremities effortlessly, someday,

Some glorious day, but not this day.

I will make things green without struggling

Like a sump pump.

I will be lifted heavenward

By light and warmth,

Not angst or force,

But by the voice of the Arborist

Calling me to Spring forth:

“Let your sap run to the sun!”

And I, with resurrection power,

Will rise again.