These things 
that feel like disfigurements,

they are 

your roots, wild,
expansive &
unsightly.

You are like a coffeewood,
yellowwood, trying to delve down
in a land stripped
for parking lot and 
littered with quick
and shallow pioneers,
in a world that would just as soon
use you for popsicle sticks
or toilet paper. They do not understand
what is happening to you.
For them it is all different.

Last through this storm 
and the next one 
and the next (for they will never cease),
and your scars will give you gravity.
They will change you in ways
that do not look pretty — you will deform,
you will knot, you will gnarl —
but these pains can pull you deep
into the cycles of things, and the moon
will become like runes,
the seasons like a drumbeat, your
heart will find the things that make
a melody of your days 

and by and by you 
will discover
a song to keep 
the wolves at bay.

Sing it with love, everyday. 
Some will be good, 
some will be bad, and some will
be nothing but the sun rising
and setting with 
the same clouds you feel you’ve seen a million times 
drifting slowly, pointlessly 
in between.

But sing,
and grow, and be;
you have no job in this world
but to be what you are,
big and lush and
more than most can handle.

And when
your roots again struggle
with the hardpan of this ruined land,
you will know to just
breathe through it, singing softly
and root deep
deep
deep
so that nothing will pull you out
before you have had 
the fill your kind
was made for.