Forgiveness: The Black Walnut
Go ahead. Bitch up a storm if you want. Call those hard husks
cracking down what you will—crocodile projectiles, apples of Gomorrah,
green meteorites, crow brimstone—but know you don’t mean what you say,
you’ll never cut down that fierce grandmother of a tree, no matter
how her fruits of doom might pock your car and startle you
with an October’s worth of shingle-denting, rifle-shot cracks,
no matter how they Rorschach your sidewalk with a test that can’t be
scrubbed away, each rain-leached stain the blackened calligraphy
of electrical burns and gunpowder blasts that read you can’t hold back
nature, no matter how trim your lawn. Because you also know damn well
how she mannas the ground each fall, know how pleased the ever-growing teeth
of the squirrels, how few would hardly survive winter, not without this gift
heaven-sent, just in time, right when the crickets begin to cricket slowlike, ambering
the autumn mornings with their long farewell, when the katydids you waited to hear all June
finally close their saw-tooth wings and drift down with the season’s dead
leaves. There is forgiveness, then, for this insistent mess
necessary for life, forgiveness for the hazard it creates right outside your door,
all those edible cannonballs causing more than one ass-busting fall.
When I finally placed a sweetly tannic bit of what that beast of tree had to give
under my own tongue, I began to understand: I began to forgive
you, began to forgive myself: We didn’t mean it; we too were just trying
to survive. I swallowed it down, and the tree, with no sense of forgiveness nor a reason
to be forgiven, flashed her compound leaves gold, dug her roots deeper to insist
her way into the cracks in our foundation, to hang on even tighter.
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister: A Novel-in-Poems and Fanny Say: A Biography-in-Poems. Read more.