A ginkgo that lives
I’ve stood here so long,
Too long for you to know;
For you live less than a hundred,
While I don’t stop to grow.
The rings in my trunk are fourteen hundred and five;
Cherry blossoms wither with a royal programmed plan.
I’ve seen one thousand two hundred seasons pass by,
Nothing has meaning, in the lost corner of Japan.
A Ginkgo simply lives too long,
Too tough, and much too strong;
From samurais to 1945,
Passing of a hundred thousand lives,
The bombing and humanity’s downfall,
I’ve seen it all, and it aches to recall.
I am now yellow, with mighty strong friends,
And old man, a cockroach, a mountain on my rear end.
Old man Nobu was a wee little lad.
His old wooden sandals,
Probably got them from his dad.
On a day like today,
He’d come to pick my fruit;
But I haven’t seen him for long,
And I cannot uproot.
A mountain does not feel, for it is soil and water;
And a cockroach does not care, for instinct is its driver.
But a Ginkgo with a brother, a best friend and a lover,
Has a ring diary in its trunk, who could have thunk?
Why not try and sit me down
Perhaps there is meaning in my long, long diary.
“Wind and water,
Destruction and war,
Why is it, God, that I have survived it all?”
I stand on open land, on a mountain with a cockroach;
Nobu’s home is long gone, and I feel nothing encroach.
The autumn wind blows, and my leaves shed once more
Centuries facing north. How many more to go?
Young lovers walk past,
And a family opens their lunch
A boy in wooden sandals, eats a Gingko nut.
Nobu speaks amidst the chaos
Meaningless tales from school
Young man, for what good reason
Did you make me an emotional fool?
I continue to stand, unable to sit
Unlike the bamboo trees, curated to be hit.
But a tree must not sit, with a meaningless life
Fourteen hundred years of questions and strife.
Another thousand years, a Ginkgo tree will survive,
With a mountain and a cockroach, on this ever-changing land.
I stand up and shed, exposed and naked
To start over in spring like I’ve always waited.
A thousand more years of people and their tales,
Nobu, Yuki and Taro,
I’ll introduce you to Haruko.
