Twisted Longevity

What endurance and grace

Has the cedar at cliff’s edge

As Nature leans into the wind

Revealing their limbs like arthritic arms and fingers

Stretching for something unseen.

Air of salt scours their bark,

Rain drills into marrow,

Yet stalwart they stand,

Knurled and exposed.

Each knot like a Nature bred wart

A memory,

Each twist a story,

Like the weathered folds on a grandmother’s face,

Etched by years of toil

As words of hurt and ignorance

Cutting deeper than storms of Nature.

Just as twisted cedar grows not straight

So goes the years of our maturing.

We learn to twist around grief and loss,

Bend beneath cruelty

And rise again

Our roots laid bare.

Yet…

Surprises never wane,

For just as the cedar resists mourning its shape,

Huming in the wind a song only the battered can hear,

So to goes the fortunate grandmother or grandfather,

Who finds not sorrow,

But a kind of wild joy

Gleaned through life’s progressive weave,

Leaving behind the mixed threads of colors building

To a completion of eternal blue

When the time is right.