Beneath the Ancient Oak
By Christopher Sopher
Valley of the Sun Press – Poetry
November 20, 2025
I sat beneath the ancient oak
on a day so bright it felt borrowed.
A quiet park.
No voices.
No footsteps.
Just the hum of the world breathing around me.
The tree called first —
not loud,
not obvious,
but with that silent pull
you only feel when something recognizes you
before you recognize it.
I walked toward it,
as if following a moment
I’d already lived
in some forgotten corner of time.
As I lay beneath the oak,
I realized it wasn’t standing alone.
The whole damn world was using it
as a home, a shelter, a lifeline.
Ants marched in tight formation
up and down the trunk,
like they were climbing a mountain
built just for them.
Tiny architects carving out rooms
in the grooves of ancient bark.
Birds — all kinds —
rested in its branches,
sang into its shade,
flew out and returned again
like the oak was their airport,
their sanctuary,
their meeting place.
Acorns dropped around me,
some cracked open,
some carried away by squirrels,
some waiting to become
another version of this giant.
One tree feeding the earth.
One tree feeding everything around it.
Life stacked on life.
A whole ecosystem built
on the back of a single,
silent, standing thing.
You don’t think about that
when you pass a tree.
You don’t see the colony it carries,
the worlds it holds together,
the way it keeps giving
without making a sound.
But lying there, looking up,
I saw just how much
one ancient oak can hold —
and how much it gives
without asking for anything
in return.
Then the world flipped.
The bark rose above me
like a spine carved by the centuries —
twisted, weathered,
written in a language older than storms.
Branches spiraled overhead,
casting shadows inside shadows,
a cathedral made of green and memory.
The leaves glowed summer-bright,
but the whole canopy
moved like a vortex,
a slow cosmic turning
etched into wood and time.
It wasn’t just a tree.
It was a map —
a blueprint of everything it had survived.
Its twists were years.
Its curves were battles.
Its bends were the fingerprints of gravity
pulling, tugging,
retraining its shape
through heatwaves,
through winters,
through the long arguments of wind.
People count rings in the trunk
to measure age.
But lying below it,
I counted spirals in the sky —
the same story,
told upward instead of inward.
Every branch was a survival.
Every limb was a lesson.
Every shadow was a memory
thrown across my chest
like a reminder.
In a forest of many,
this was the one
that looked back.
And all I could see
woven through its body
was the journey it carried —
not calm,
not easy,
but carved by storms so wild
they nearly broke it.
Nearly.
But not enough.
Because here it stands —
a vortex of time,
the map of endurance,
ancient witness to everything
and still reaching for light.
A reminder, I thought —
it’s more than just a tree,
it’s a testament of time.
And a life force to so many.
