ON ONE KNOLL OF THE EARTH IN HEAVEN’S SIGHT

I made my way to a sequestered knoll

To find the plain white church whose steeple

I could see from far away on the main road,

And so I did, and saw the date 1802

Set in a stained glass window, and looked up

To see that steeple rising a good eighty feet

Into the sky.  So strong the charm of both

The building, and, beyond, the prospect of

The broad blue river to the east, it was

Not hard to understand why many couples,

As I knew, had come here to be joined

As man and wife.

It was about this time

I saw, no more than twenty yards away,

The church’s neighbor on the knoll, a tree

Whose height was roughly equal to the spire’s,

Whose trunk down at the base would take at least

Four men with arms outstretched to circle it.

Going over for a look, I found a bronze plaque

Bolted to that trunk on which a legend

Told me that it was an English linden,

Planted there in 1774.

So this tree, under which I stood,

Was older than the country was.

That thought in itself gave pause before

I let my eyes begin to travel upward,

Past the first huge horizontal boughs

Themselves as big as ordinary trees,

Into the labyrinth of branches, up

And up, until my gaze was blocked by the

Green multitude of leaves,

and dropped back down.

From such a presence, a magnificence,

It seemed the thing to do to back away

For a few steps, and so I did, then turned

And walked to my parked car.

It would take time

To fully see how these two, the old church

And the great tree, not only complemented

One another but in some larger sense were one.

It lay with the old dialogue between

Creator and created: man, contrite,

Yet ever striving to achieve God’s grace,

God ever striving to reveal himself

If man would only have the eyes to see.

In the tall tapered steeple was man’s voice,

In the serene and mighty linden, God’s.

No apter marriage ever was perfomed

Within church walls than this of church and tree

On one knoll of the earth in heaven’s sight.

RICHARD ALDRIDGE

Used By Permission of Abigail Aldridge, daughter of Richard