Forgive me for a voice that age has somewhat impaired.
I wish someone else were reading.
[LAUGHING]
Never mind.
I had the chance the other day to visit a terrific art
exhibition at the University of Arizona's fascinating laboratory
of tree-ring research.
And what a building that is gorgeous.
Like a trunk-- shining trunk.
The scientists there studying Earth's history
that's carried, as in the expanding rings of old trees.
And I think of it because in this poem, in a similar way,
it is trees who carry time.
This time our cultural memory.
There are now what's estimated to be 100 million migrant people
displaced by wars, famine, injustice, climate change.
And what are we to make of such numbers without going numb?
They need as witness something larger, older, more rooted.
So in this poem, it is the trees who took over.
The trees who speak, and who are slowly revealed as the willows
from Psalm 137.
I'll quote a few lines to set the poem in the Psalm
that speaks so eloquently of the recurrent experience of exile,
and which has recently gathered fresh tragedy roads.
"By the rivers of Babylon.
There we sat down, we wept when we remembered home.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive, required of us
a song.
And that wasted us, required of us mirth.
For the willows to bless.
With a shower of leaves red in the dawn,
the stream by our side.
River flow idling a little back spill the shrill cry of a bird.
And little by little, as the light grew,
the sun crested the hills.
And as it splintered its gold among our leaves
a two legged figure appeared.
And behind it another.
Another, as if the horizon itself
was an opening seam from which they were pouring.
A column stretching back and back over the hills
that the sun had just mounted.
They were backlit by that sun.
Flat silhouettes and it was hard to discern one from another,
so alike they appeared.
And so endless their procession.
And as they approached us we tensed,
feeling something between apprehension and wonder.
So much like an army of ants, they seemed so many, so many.
As they came closer, we heard a great keening so that unsure
how to greet them.
Aware they brought with them a great grief,
we offered them what we could.
Shade, a cool shelter from the heat that
had begun to follow the sun.
A soft bed of needles from the pine to sleep on.
And as we caught and played the breeze in our leaves,
we sang to them.
Our thoughts moving in the slipstream of time's passage.
Wind in the harps hung in our branches.
Left there in despair by others so like them.
Years ago, slow circles of years we can barely remember.
Still the song of the wind in the harp strings
has mingled and merged with our tendrils of thought.
A singing we offer them now.
This sorrowing multitude.
Who in return bring their tears to water our roots.