Golden Reflections

The mightiest tree on this acreage stands
More than seventy feet, straight and tall
Where I felled a tree with a younger man’s hands
Now, it is I who must fall
The birds in that tree are the sons of the sons
Of the sons of the birds I first knew
Their song mocks the works of the two-legged ones
And every note of it’s true

Chorus:

Golden reflections lie still on the water
Unbroken by struggle or strife
And the leaves of the autumn drift down to the bottom
Just like the days of my life

Swept by the snowfalls of seventy winters
Its branches have bent with the weight
Lightning has shattered its crown into splinters
Humbly it lives with its fate
Here are the scars where a porcupine fed
Here are the marks of a deer
But the mark of the man and the life that he led
In the shade of the tree disappear

(Chorus)

Reaching for heaven with roots in the earth
The tree and the man are the same
But the man seeks for glory from the moment of birth
And suffers for all he can claim
The tree in its wisdom seeks only to live
And takes but a piece of the sky
And so an old man with no life left to give
By a young tree now closes his eyes

(Chorus)

Sometimes I think I have no right to try to convey something that amounts to wisdom, least of all the wisdom of many years. But the chorus of this song is the strongest lyric I’ve written, I think, and it aches so much to sing it I can’t leave it alone.

Toronto, Ontario, 1999.