Melanie

“You told me trees could speak
and the only reason one heard
silence in the forest
was that they had all been born knowing different languages.

That night I went into the forest
to bury dictionaries under roots,
so many books in so many tongues
as to insure speech.

and now this very moment,
the forest seems alive
with whispers and murmurs and rumblings of sound
wind-rushed into my ears.

I do not speak any language
that crosses the silence around me
but how soothing to know
that the yearning and grasping embodied
in trees’ convoluted and startling shapes
is finally being fulfilled
in their wind shouts to each other.

Yet we who both speak English
and have since we were born
are moving ever farther apart
even as branch tips touch.”
― Carol Goodman, The Drowning Tree

“There is an odd synchronicity in the way parallel lives veer to touch one another, change direction, and then come close again and again until they connect and hold for whatever it was that fate intended to happen.”
― Ann Rule

“When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world.”
― Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud: A Poem

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander