There are mornings when you can no longer tell how you keep standing. You look at the yard, the street, the noise around you, and you wonder where the patience has been put away. More often than not, it is by laying a hand against a tree that you find your own again. Trees do not narrate their weariness. They carry it, season after season, in a silence nothing rushes. This poem was born of a hand placed on a trunk one November day, in search of an answer no one nearby knew how to say.
They say nothing, and yet they hold.
The wind speaks to them in a language of fatigue,
they answer rooted, slow, certain
that each lost leaf is a promise
dressed in wood and patience.
I laid my hand against a trunk one November morning.
It was colder than me, lonelier than me,
and standing long before my name began.
I asked it how one learns to remain
when everything around decides to leave.
It said nothing. The wind finished the thought.
And in that silence, I understood
that strength is not a shout:
it is a presence that returns, season after season,
even when no one is watching.
Strength almost never looks the way we imagine. It does not speak loudly. It does not announce itself. It leaves no great visible mark. It looks more like an old tree at the edge of a path — a being that has weathered storms it no longer tells, that has lost leaves it no longer mourns, and that keeps on growing without sound. If you are walking through a difficult season, this poem is not advice — it is a hand laid down beside yours on the same cold trunk. Patience is never passive. It is that very simple, and very difficult, decision to remain standing one more day, and then another, and to let the spring do the rest.
