"Trees"

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,

To stay in one's own place;

To stand for the constant presence of process

And always to seem the same.

To be steady as a rock and always trembling,

Having the hard appearance of death

With the soft, fluent nature of growth,

One's Being deceptively armored,

One's Becoming deceptively vulnerable;

To be so tough, and take the light so well,

Freely providing forbidden knowledge

Of so many things about heaven and earth 

For which we should otherwise have no word -

Poems or people are rarely so lovely,

And even when they have great qualities

They tend to tell you rather than exemplify

What they believe themselves to be about,

While from the moving silence of trees,

Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,

Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,

Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,

And perilous also - though there has never been

A critical tree - about the nature of things.

-   Howard Nemerov