SILK-COTTON TREE

Proudly you stand there, so regal, in your gargantuan majesty,
a gentle, verdant giant, towering over the canopy;
in leafless April, swaying, silken tresses, your kapok crown adorn,
beautiful maiden betrothed, bedecked upon her marital morn.

There was a time not long ago, it’s said, when
Houleyg, Socouyant, Papa Bois, La Diablesse and Douen,
Garbie, Jumbie, Lagahou and many a ghoulish fiend
would walk and stalk the land disguised as men;
that in that time, when men feared the four-road,
your buttressed tent served a ghostly abode.

Should I believe that under buttressed tent
sinister strangers, strange, of evil bent,
money-hungry men with diabolical intent,
ambition and achievement, would go to any length
at the witching-hour, with Faustian pact cement
fleeting financial success with debenture dement,

confront Mephistoph' at midnight, by candlelight,
and faint-hearted men turn ghastly white,
with thought of flight, transfixed by fright,
in the middle of the still, dark night,
deal with the Devil, in season of penitent Lent,
and sell souls to eternal damnation and torment…

or when measuring tape your wing could not encompass,
Rangers recording ‘exceeding twenty five feet girth’;
on scaffolding, courageous men would climb, and with axe
achieve the daunting, the seeming impossible feat,
chop, chop, chop after chop, bring you crashing down to earth,
prostrate, humbled at their feet, in deafening defeat;

or that many primitive years, not so long ago,
Amerindians dug soft belly for drum and canoe,
with Warahoon ritual incantation, a shaman
would beseech benediction to bless expedition
from Mainland to sacred old hill of Naparima
or to send young warriors off to adventure or war.

Ceiba, your trunk spans centuries, continents and oceans,
your kapok crown spreads across the Old World to the New;
you who soothed the uneasy dreams of kings and queens
with sweet repose on kapok-filled mattress and pillow,
so mighty, once “monarch of all you survey”, it’s true,
in this age of destruction, what lies ahead for you?

Can spiny armour protect you from marauding man
as he wantonly decimates your habitation?
Will you one day, like pawi, be faced with extinction.
Pentandra, like legendary son of Pendragon,
King Arthur, will you meet your demise, meet your Camlan,
by power-saw, skidder and bush fire, at the hand

of mankind’s civilized, globalized insanity?
A shaman said, when rivers dry and rain forest die,
sacrificed on altars of progress and expediency,
only then will humanity truly come to see,
beyond misguided messiahs, science and technology,
that you and I, and nature, all life, are one, Silk-cotton tree.

Proudly you stand there, so regal, in your gargantuan majesty,
a gentle, verdant giant, towering over the canopy.
O Tree of Life, will your silent strength be enough to conquer, the monster
concrete jungle who, your primal jungle, seeks to devour, forever.

Copyright ©2001 by G. Newton V. Chance