THE JESSE TREE
To shape a life out of marble or granite
requires quarrying and carting, teams
of people and horses, and, out of bronze,
mined metals, a furnace, and a mould
crafted with lapidary precision.
But wood is ubiquitous – before navies
are commissioned, and sheep runs enclosed –
oak forests overlaying hills and valleys.
When folk live close to where they are born,
and history is what you are told by your kin,
and generations are short, and count;
when the priest says, “Jesse begat David the king
and David the king begat Solomon
all the way to Jesus”; when the priest says,
“Isaiah talks of Jesse as a tree”;
when your world is full of people with these names,
the Jordan seems only half a day’s journey
away, just beyond the next range of hills.
Sometimes ideas are like clouds, slow,
lumbering, or slight, whipped by the wind,
or lightning that hits the gut – like the fork
that fells the big oak near the river,
its torn-up roots like a man reclining.
So the wood carver creates, chisels and paints
Jesse and all his progeny, ascending
to the crown of the tree, the Son of God –
generations secure on an old man’s back.
Clive Watkins
September 14, 2023I like this a lot, David – for two reasons, one perhaps a little aside from your words. First, your poem makes me think of the carved Tree of Jesse in St Mary’s, Abergavenny. Here is a link: https://www.historytoday.com/tree-jesse. If you did not have this in mind, you certainly brought it into mine. The second, slightly off-beat, remark concerns the second paragraph here. I wonder if you know that wonderful book Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294 – 1324, originally written in French by the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. From the detailed records kept by the Catholic Inquisitors during that period, including what seem to have been contemporaneous notes taken of interviews with suspected heretics, Ladurie constructed a rich picture of the world, including the mental world, of the Cathars, living out their lives in remote Pyrenean villages. I recommend the book. The idea you touch on that generations and times that to us seem very far off were for the makers of the Jesse Tree really quite close to hand is akin to something Ladurie reports of his Cathar subjects. Indeed he has a whole chapter entitled (in English) ‘Concepts of Time and Space’. Fascinating stuff. Thank you.
Anne Douglas
September 14, 2023Very interesting piece
Mary Clark
September 22, 2023That idea of spacetime proximity holds here in Appalachia. An otherwise bright person might believe hell was reached by Russian drillers (known as the Well to Hell) not far beneath the earth’s surface. Jesus is a presence just over the next range of hills. I guess it does give people a sense of security.