The Beauty of White Oak Sinks

Here where the ancient wood parts its veil

and violet-crowned earth lays herself bare,

the wildflowers rise like some forgotten tale

told soft by oaks that have learned

to simply stand and stare.

🌿 ✨ 🌸 🍃 🌙

Sweet tender holler, sanctuary blessed

by light that filters through skeletal boughs,

where moss-draped trunks lean earthward,

dispossessed of upright pride

yet noble still in their slow surrender.

🌿 ✨ 🌸 🍃 🌙

The path winds on, that narrow winding way

of earthen brown, winding between

congregations of bluest blooms

that crown the mossy dead

like a resurrection no one declared.

🌿 ✨ 🌸 🍃 🌙

How lavish Beauty spends herself in spring,

adorning what no mortal eye comes seeking,

the fallen log made golden,

alive with emerald life

along its weathered and forgotten cheek.

🌿 ✨ 🌸 🍃 🌙

Sweet White Oak Sinks, you hold within yourself

the secret all wanderers pursue,

that nothing lovely ever truly rests

but dies only to rise again

in ways more beautiful than before.

🌿 ✨ 🌸 🍃 🌙

And when my own brief season comes to close,

let me lie down in such a place as this,

where beauty gives itself so freely,

and even in the falling,

we still glow.

Author's note: I wrote this poem about a hike I did on a trail in the Smokey Mountains called White Oak Sinks Trail.