white sentinels

I just love sycamores in winter. The rest of the year they are such ordinary trees. But the moment that the leaves come down, the sycamores stand forth as the stark white sentinels of the forest.

In the mountains here, most of the roads follow the rivers and steams, and sycamores like the water. Huge sycamores stand between the road and the dull brown hillsides. In the early evening just before sunset when I'm on my way home from work, the sycamores stand in dramatic contrast to the darker hillsides.

One evening I remember, a moment, just as I drove around a curve, where a single huge, old sycamore was visible against a darkening violet sky, and a nearly full moon was tangled in its branches. How, I would have loved to have stopped to appreciate that, but there was a huge coal truck on my tail, and no place to pull off the road. Thank, G-d for memory.

There's a fairly large sycamore, just across the river from my office, I can see its polished fingers reaching skyward if I just turn my head slightly from the computer. I am worried, that the construction crew that is building a pedestrian bridge across the river (to connect the two parts of our small campus) may have to take down this tree.

I keep trying to write poems that convey how sycamores in winter make me feel, but nothing has ever quite captured the essence.