There was once a tree which a nuthatch knew truly to be kind. When the wind blew scathingly, and the tree felt the nuthatch, stepping upon its bark, become uncertain, it would give up its nearby branches to the storm. When the wind only ruffled gently, the nuthatch taught the tree the joy of a cold stream against the feet.
The tree's heart and mind were a conjunction of its roots and the living earth in which they wound. But it could feel each knot of bark on which the nuthatch landed; could guide it by the refraction of light in its resin.
Yet the nuthatch did not belong this far north, and the time came for it to return.
Though to some the tree was aloof, four deer then came to it when tiny. With the slow vigour of its sap veins, with the time-wisened strength of the rings of its inner wood, the tree would teach them its kindness: feed them from its bark in the winter; from its buds in the spring and early summer; from blueberries and foxberries — nestling thickly underneath the high branches on one sunny side of it — in the late summer and autumn.
But the tree knew a sadness — had always known it. Lightened by the calm coming and going of its leaves; by longed-for morning warmth, amongst moist moss, in early spring; by the first footprints of its deer-children upon fresh, coruscating snow; but irremovable.
Much time passed. The nuthatch would send word to the tree, and the tree, proud to hear of it carrying out its work in its thickets, would send word to the nuthatch.
One day the tree sensed anew the touch of the nuthatch's little wing on its bark. The nuthatch told, long into the night, of open sea, of lighthouses on skerries, of low hills of rock and grass tumbling up from the shore, of plains like those of a Western, of forest — now like that of which the tree was part, now otherwise. The tree felt what the nuthatch — cheerily, deftly hopping from trunk to branch to trunk in its furrows — had felt and now felt; and what they felt would endure, reverberating in leaf and wing.
Composed during the evening of the 23rd of May, 2022. Written down in the evening of the 25th of May, 2022.
Last updated: 22:34 (GMT+2), 4th September 2023