What if each branch of a tree is a grief it has lived through?
A sorrow, or a trauma, or a trial it grew into?
Each bend a testament to the winds it overcame,
to the pressures under which that tree had been shaped.
What if the thicker the trunk, the thicker the heart—
and the tougher the roots, the tougher the start?
Unbearable loss woven deep into the grain,
Each leaf a memory, each knot an ache.
What if every bend and twist is a scar left by a storm?
What if the tree stands tall, not as a victim of it’s crooked form,
but a warrior of its wars?
My first branch was sharp.
It was a dart to my naïve, untouched, ten-year-old heart.
It carved its mark deep,
a sow I didn’t know how to reap.
And that was only the first.
It sometimes still hurts to know
that the tree I was before,
would never again purely grow.
Then, more branches came—
I learned the worst are those with a face and a name.
I started to lose count.
It’s easier for me to say, “I have so many branches now.”
Than to relive my every hurt, and explain,
“Hey! I’ve been through a lot of shit.”
I’ve led a life with too many bruises
and too much grief,
and too many branches
and too many leaves
to hold
for a tree
whose number of rings is only in the twenties.
I ache for the small-trunked trees I see
with too many branches to count.
Their delicate, narrow trunks
barely strong enough for any branch to sprout.
I see the weight, how it bends them.
I feel an ache deep in my core—
because I know just the weight they will forever have in store.
I know that once one branch splits open, breaking bark,
there’s no going back from a first-time breaking heart.
They are a part of you,
no matter how much we want to cut them off and bury them.
More branches grow on trees,
and the trees learn how to carry them.
I’ve got lots of branches,
for which I don’t often feel equipped.
Stories from my pains,
reminders of my hardest days
when my roots felt impossibly unsure of their grip.
Sometimes, one branch threatens to break.
So I give it a trim.
Not because I want to forget her face
or forget the remnants of him.
But because I need to breathe,
to leave space,
to be remade.
They’ve made me who I am
and that’s a weight I wouldn’t trade.
And it burns, letting go.
But sometimes losing a branch
is the only way to grow.
While I sat beneath my favorite tree,
looking up at the sky between the bustling green of leaves—
My mind began to wonder:
Why are the branch-iest of trees the ones that people like to sit under?
It’s because with lots of branches,
they’re more interesting to climb in.
And in insufferable heat,
they provide the shade to lie in.
It’s because they’re safe and sturdy,
with trunks who’ve held up heavy things.
It’s because of their maturity,
that in Fall, their colors sing.
Perhaps the trees with lots of branches have held up heavy weight,
to one day help another tree to grow a branch that weighs the same.
Without thick trunks and twists and turns and knots and scars and leaves,
we wouldn’t get to sit beneath the most beautiful of trees.