This must be what it’s like to be an ant,
tall pillars rising all around you, the hilly ground
with its pebbles and twigs beneath your feet
as you walk in silence, one attentive step after another.
I suppose ants don’t see the bright spray
of red leaves caught in the pine’s boughs
like some Christmas decoration. Their world
differs so much from mine, although we
are a part of each other’s, inextricably.
Do the pines know that leaves dance in their arms?
Some part of me believes they do, that they know
vast swaths of the world beyond my own perception.
They are old, after all, having lived on this earth
twice as long as I have. They have risen high
above the earth that holds their sprawling roots.
They commune with sky and wind and birds
and know the seasons. They listen to the stars.
When I walk among them, awe fills me, and wonder.
I touch their rugged bark and breathe their fragrance.
I see their fallen cones and the stems of the cones
left after the squirrels have pulled off their scales
to feast on the hidden nuts. I laugh at the heaps
of them piled between the roots of the trees.
The squirrels here, I see, are well nourished.
And as I walk here, so am I.