Morning Trees
- Morning Trees
after "I Travel as a Phantom Now" by Thomas Hardy
Here is a secret world thatis mine for the listening.A place of cool breathingleaves, barely moving.Where birds trill and sing andwelcome in the new day.A holy place unnoticedby those rushing past, a churchthey do not realize exists.Look, a God-made chapel.
I am here. I worshipin these good morning trees.Where two or more are gatheredso am I sayeth theLord. Well, we are here. Amultitude of songbirds.And we will rejoice. Thelittle fox and me. Thewild birds, the holy leavesof early October.
For nowadays I movethrough this world like a ghost.Not even my own familyrecognizes me lately.They do not understandthat only recently [End Page 140] I have become myself.They do not know me sincethey refuse to see whoI am. But here, God knows. [End Page 141]
Silas House is the nationally bestselling author of six novels, most recently Same Sun Here (with Neela Vaswani), as well as three plays and one book of creative nonfiction. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and his writing has appeared in Newsday, Oxford American, Narrative, and many others. House serves as the NEH Chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University's MFA in creative writing. His novel Southernmost will be published in June 2018.
