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This is a season full of personal and cultural fugits of tempus, sweeps of time’s hands, clicks of the clock.
‘Tis the season of weddings and graduations, house-buying and house-selling, moving in and moving out. For us personally it is, as you have read here, a time of loss, but also a time of celebration: birthdays and anniversaries echoed across multiple generations; expectations (new school, new jobs, new life, new place); satisfactions (deeds done, goals accomplished, pains soothed).
We are at a particularly thick spot in the weekly Torah-reading as well. Where peoplehood, connection, mutual responsibility, closeness and belonging seem riper than ever.
It was at this heightened moment, when we can almost hear the ticking of the universe’s grand clock, that I ran across this poem, soulful and sad in its inevitability, yet comforting in the way it sees time running on… if we are lucky enough, and have worked hard enough, to be part of a community that proudly claims us, and whom we, in turn, delight in calling our own.
Translation
by Robert Morgan
Where trees grow thick and tall
In the original woods
The older ones are not
Allowed to fall but break
And lean into the arms
Of neighbors, shedding bark
And limbs and bleaching silver
And gradually sinking piece
By piece into the bank
Of rotting leaves and logs
To be absorbed by next
Of kin and feeding roots
Of soaring youth, to fade
Invisibly into
The shady floor in their
Translation to the future.
Happy Father’s Day.
(The photograph is of wild woods I pass on one of my walking routes near my home.)
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