Au Reservoir!

From the desert to the mountains, where the computers of man have never set foot, is where I'll be for the rest of the month (except for occasional trips to the nearest town's library and use of their computer when it's available). I wanted to leave you some nuggets from my latest harvest of Women Who Quote With The Wolves and I can't find it. Instead, A Book of Treasured Poems
(1937), opened at random, gifts you and me with this old favorite.

TREES

Joyce Kilmer

1886-1918

The cruel hand of war falls to crush the weary and the weak; and too often it takes unfair toll of the gentle. McCrae lives in Flanders Fields; Seeger is forever at his Rendezvous; Brooke sleeps on an island of the old Aegean; and Kilmer rests below the Trees of the Ourcq in France.

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed

Against the sweet Earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robbins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

Be well, beloveds. You travel with me in heart.