“The trees can’t control their lives. We can’t always control what happens to us. The trees can teach us acceptance. And metamorphosis.”
– Linda Brown, quoted in The Nature Fix.
I should hope to pray
Like the trees, roots running deep,
Limbs singing above.
Blending earth and sky,
Supplicants sway and bow, each
Snowy branch and bough
A sylvan chorus,
A genuflective dance, a
Chance to waltz with God.
-photograph and poem by Gene Hyde
Gene Hyde lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, where he occasionally takes pictures and writes things down. His poetry has appeared in Valley Voices and The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture, and his essay ‘Shooting Rivers and Smoldering Churches: Fire and Rain in Southern Appalachia’ is forthcoming in Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (2019, West Virginia University Press)