The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

PRESENTATIONS: CHARLES KNOTT

Charles Knott, editor and featured writer for The Grapevine's Reflections and Entertaining Ideas columns, also writes reviews ... and now, a poem!

My Holly Tree

The Holly Tree in the front yard of our giant, tumble-down family home that was the family home of several who have already lived and died before us. My ancient young mother looking with bright-faced joy, looking with childish awe and joy at the productivity of its low hanging branches. Its red berries, their bright darkness burning into the morning fog, plentiful to the bursting point, bearing its branches toward the earth. The tree from which we took a leaf and a berry to lay beside my brother in his coffin and, later, on his cold stone. The tree that yields its all, that, in its simple courage, holds back nothing, that produces, unconcerned, in the midst of a human parade that has progressed around it, through shadow and sunlight, for more generations than I, or even my mother, have been alive.

What is your secret, holy Tree? What thoughts pulse slowly through you? Yours is the secret we all run from, as if that secret were too holy for we fragile, short-lived creatures to face. And where shall we run? And why do you not run? You long ago relinquished the power to run anywhere, and then the secret power entered your body and made you holy.