Trees Walking
(Mark 8: 22-26)
He took me off somewhere where we were all
Alone, and in my blindness I could hear
Him spit and felt the wet of him like tears
Upon my eyes. And then I heard him call
To me and ask what I could see. “A scrawl
Of shapes,” I said, “that look like walking trees.”
At second touch I felt my soul unfreeze
And all the darkness blindly from me fall.
He bid me then to go my newborn way;
To head for home but not by paths I knew
For now the known could easily lead astray.
Yet as I headed off and could construe
My fellow men, I wished they might someway
Be trees again a moment there or two.
Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, Amethyst Review, the St. Austin Review, The Society of Classical Poets, The Road Not Taken, Edge of Faith, Pensive, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.
Amethyst Review 