Pine Tree Tops - Turtle Island

This poem is simple and beautiful.  It is also on one of my favorite subjects – trees.  The poem starts by describing the night, which is blue and glowing.  The image here is one of peace and comfort, as opposed to a black, harsh night.  The trees are said to bend and fade, and in my mind, melt into the horizon.  This reminds me of the time I went into the Shenandoah valley to camp in a cabin with my family. From the valley, the tree tops created a vibrant blue in the Blue Ridge Mountains and intertwined to create one giant blanket of leaves.  The poem ends with the lines, “rabbit tracks, deer tracks, what do we know.”  This was a very powerful ending to me.  It speaks to the fact that though we can see things, we often do not know them.  And even when we think we know something, how can we be sure of it?  Like the tracks described in the poem, we as people cannot fully understand them. We can tell what animal they are from and tell the general direction of where they are going, but we will never know what it is like to be an animal among nature.  They have a sacred place in nature, as do we, but it is more primitive I might say.  They wander, search for food, mate, and are fueled by instinct.  We as people make tracks and wander in our calculated human ways. We rarely just wander in the woods to wander.  We rarely take the time to actually see what is around us and appreciate nature.  I find myself only reflecting on the tree tops from the valley that I saw because of this poem, I needed a reminder.  I was not able to simply wander and appreciate like the animals.  We can learn a lesson from them and truly by preset in whatever moment we are in and take nature for all it is worth, wandering and truly immersing ourselves into it.