Welcome to
Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting
Religious Society of Friends
(Quakers)

Trees, by Howard Nemerov

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one’s own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;
To be steady as a rock and always trembling,
Having the hard appearance of death
With the soft, fluent nature of growth,
One’s Being deceptively armored,
One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable;
To be so tough, and take the light so well,
Freely providing hidden knowledge
Of so many things about heaven and earth
For which we should otherwise have no word—
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about,
Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,
Night or day, we draw conclusion of our own,
Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,
And perilous also – though there has never been
A critical tree – about the nature of things.