Among Olive Trees – a poem by Jeffrey Essmann

Among Olive Trees

We slowly grow, we olive trees, but live
For many years. Our memories are old,
Are seeded, bedded in the earth and nursed
On earthly time. Our memories are rich
With loam, with stories passed from root to root
Until they’re written in the gnarled twists
And tortured turnings of our ancient trunks.
For we’re a knotty yet a noble race;
We’ve not the levity of willows nor
The elegance of elms. We envy not
The fabled strength of oaks and feel no call
To emulate the aspen’s chaste demean. 
We some of us have lived a thousand years
And some have even more. We know ourselves
And know the steady ache of time; have inch
By inch and year by year our skyward push
Maintained as empires around us far 
More quickly grew but of a sudden fell,
The names of those who ruled them unrecalled.
We find that human stories come and go,
But now and then a simple moment claims
Its place in memory, will not give way
To Time’s corrosive chafe. Our eldest tell
Us of a time long past, an evening when
A man—a rabbi, so they said, or some 
Such thing—had come among us, fallen to
His knees and cried aloud into the face
Of death while farther off his friends were all
Asleep. And then some people came, were rude
And rough and quite abruptly took him off.
We always wondered what became of him. 
(The friends woke up but quickly ran away…)

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, the St. Austin Review, Ekstasis Magazine, Amethyst Review, The Society of Classical Poets, Modern Reformation, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He was the 2nd Place winner in the Catholic Literary Arts 2022 Assumption of Mary poetry contest and 1st Place winner in its Advent: Mary Mother of Hope contest later that year. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.