Hail, King Arbor, vice-regent of the paradisal garden!
Springing, a wooden fountain clawing up and seizing handfuls of sky,
Towering, dancing in winds that cannot bow him,
With every breeze rattling branches scratch out a shout.
Padded with armor layered in sheaves and shingles,
Constant cloak accented of moss and vine and bubbles of fungus,
Weathered of snows and rains and smokes and fires,
Fitted snug o’er the ageless trunk, ever-young beneath time’s rings.
Steward of life, he cradles birdlings in nested branches,
In chewed divots and caves hiding the squirrel and his kin,
His skin alive with deep burrowing beetles and grubs and thousands of worms,
Beneath his leafy mantle are sheltered the fox and the deer.
While branches sway and leaves fly in stormy havoc,
And beasts and creeping things are shaken and tossed,
His stoic roots, unimpressed, anchor the forest to the world,
Laboring buried and ever unmoved, in dark earthen dignity.
Here he stands, shoulder to shoulder with his brethren,
A sylvan army assembled to keep watch as the centuries drift by,
Council of elders evergreen presiding over the passage of epochs,
Terra’s first tribe bonded inseparable under countless dusks and dawns.
And there he stands, all solitary, vertical spire against a flat horizon,
No less regal for the absence of peers, but still defiant and noble,
Standing in judgement uncontested over an undiscerning globe,
Convicting all, dismissing them as airy flights ephemeral.