We Believe In Trees

Grown from an English town
the size of four oxgangs, farmed
through generations, spreading
through Cheshire where good
John Sharps, is convicted, in 1679,
of crimes against the state—his “moral
failure” a repeated refusal to attend
the Church of England, as recorded
in “A Collection of the Sufferings
of the People called Quakers.”
John’s sufferings lead him to leave
home on a ship with William Penn. 

My own Granny Sharps, born
two centuries later, in 1880, deep
in the West Virginia hills, told me
when the ancestors first arrived,
in a land they named Penn’s Woods,
they found shelter in the boughs
of a white oak. Granny said she believed
the sufferings of life are best endured
in the company of trees, branching
the voice of God.