I am an old oak with an ancient heart, saddened by how the forest has changed since a time I no longer remember.

I feel old blood coursing through me and it feels like home. I feel jurassic winds in my leaves and recognise the tune it sings so sweet. Music our world has forgotten. Music I forgot too when cut and ripped and surrounded by weeds.

But I hear the beat of a heart now and all it has to offer. I feel the treasure of our sex and the reward of our skin. I am tender where the world has become rough and I see what it seems only the birds above me still do.

And yet my heritage heart has been asked a question it can not yet answer. A proposition with such great reward and yet a challenge greater than these branches know how to hold.

Can I allow you and your travelled heart, sworn to me true, in to my gentle heart?

Can I find an arm and lay you there? Stroke your hair and caress your breast as it was the only time for the both of us? And can I see the colour of your blood on me and see mine in there as well? Or are these eyes too old to see the possibility of a new beauty in your hue?

Can this trunk contain your wild journeys and open heart? Can it see your love and understand its speech?

And can you wrap your arms around me now and hear my long lost song? Can you climb inside my creaking heart and look out at yourself through my star flashed eyes? And will you see how my wooden bones are reaching for you? And will you see how I struggle and how your perfect nature sways my very core?

But most of all, my woodland wife, can you see how I love you despite my old ways?

Can you love me as I stand, with your knowledge of me? With my vision of you? Twisted and weathered, fashioned from rocks and softened by winds. My bark engraved with forgotten runes and my creak the song of lovers lost.

Can we find a way to live tall and strong forever now, without crashing from the canopy to the dirt below?

So with all that is in me and with every inch of my roots, as my plea to the earth and my prayer to the mountain, I roar to the skies and declare my love. I thunder through this monstrous heart to learn to love you now.

Can we meet by the river with new songs in our hearts? New music that makes melodies to bring gods in tears to their knees. And let’s make love unending, for all days of days.

Just you and me. The oak and the blossom tree.

Relephant Read:

How Do we Know if we Love Someone?

Author: Andy Charrington

Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: Linh Nguyen/Flickr