The Pines Let Me

a poem

I’m not planning to post on social media over the next few weeks, but I am scheduling a poem a week to go out to subscribers during this time.

The Pines Let Me

The pines don’t move
until they do —
a long slow lean
and then still again,
the straw on the ground
undisturbed beneath them.

I have been walking this road
long enough that my old Nikes know it.
The red clay where the sand gives out.

The low place that smells like itself
all year, but more so now.

A Carolina wren throws its whole self
into something it needs to say
from inside the yaupon.

I don’t look.

That voice doesn’t need a body.
Somewhere back in the timber
a pileated is working a dead pine,
that hollow knock
traveling through the morning
like a question with no interest
in being answered.

The sweet gum near the cow’s wading pond
still holds last year’s orbs
on bare branches.
The redbud is starting
in the understory,
that quiet pink
nobody asked for
arriving anyway.

I cross the low water
and my steps change sound.

The pond is the color
of the dirt it came from.
It doesn’t go anywhere fast.
It just stays.

A white-breasted nuthatch
moves down a loblolly
headfirst,
as if gravity
were a matter of preference.

I watch it
longer than I meant to.

The light in here
comes in where it can.

Long and thin through the canopy,
falling on nothing in particular,
which is how it falls
on everything.

I am not why I came out here.
I forgot that for a while.
The pines let me.

---

My book, At Home with God: How the Cross Transforms Us, is coming out this fall from InterVarsity Press. Preorders help the book reach more readers, churches, and small groups. If you’d like to support the book and help it find its way into more hands, you can preorder here:https://www.amazon.com/At-Home-God-Cross-Transforms/dp/1514017008