The Oak's Shadow: A Silent Witness

Lyrics

Old one.
Quercus virginiana.
Before the number, before the name on the road.
Your roots went looking for water in the deep red clay.
You were here before the trace was a road, before the road was paved.

I think about your first hundred years.
The quiet centuries.
The wind, the sound of moccasins on damp earth.
Filtered light on dark hair, on faces I will never know.
The rustle of deer in the undergrowth, the scent of woodsmoke on the breeze.
No one owned the shade you cast back then.
It just fell where it fell, a gift.

And your shadow holds it all.
A silent witness, anchored deep in Georgia soil.
A hundred rings of summer heat, a hundred winters of quiet sleep.
The slow, unwritten memory of wood and leaf.

Then came the noise. Summer, nineteen-twenty-three.
The scream of the saws on your younger brothers.
The sharp, clean smell of fresh-cut pine.
Rhythmic hammers in the humid Atlanta air.
A man named H. Gordon Jones, he looked up at your branches, I imagine.
And Francis Palmer Smith drew a careful line on his blueprint, right around you.
A small mercy, or maybe just a calculation.
They needed your history to sell their future.

And your shadow holds it all.
A silent witness, anchored deep in Georgia soil.
A hundred rings of summer heat, a hundred winters of quiet sleep.
The slow, unwritten memory of wood and leaf.

You have watched the first fire catch in the new hearth.
Watched generations of children learn to walk on the lawn you keep cool.
You've heard the whispers and the arguments through the open summer windows.
Your acorns drop on a Tesla roof, the same way they dropped on the bare ground.
You still transpire hundreds of gallons a day, a living cloud over Buckhead.
They don't see it. But you do it anyway. Your quiet work.

The May pollen falls again this year.
A fine golden dust on everything they think is new.
You are still here.
Casting your long, cool shadow on twenty-one Cherokee Road.
Still here.
Old one.