Don’t Listen to the Willows Weep

I

Don’t listen to the willows weep.

A wailing sorrow, cutting, deep

And if you lend their cries an ear

Astray from hearth and home you’ll keep.

Don’t listen, to the willows weep.

For it will haunt your wake and sleep

Your feet will itch

Your heart will ache

For in the willows’ weeping wake

You’ll want to heed their cries

Their call

To run

To sprint

To save them all

But you don’t realise my boy

The weeping willows know no joy

They feel no platitudes of sorrow,

No grief today

No fear tomorrow

The weeping willows weep for none.

For it’s their nature, little one.

II

I kept a weeping willow once.

I was a fool, a blessed dunce.

It wept and wept,

Come night or day

Come gentle moonlight,

Morning spray

Come storm or sunshine

Gale or hail,

It wept – And I now too

Wept

To no avail.

Once, I gazed up from its trunk,

That afternoon it was my bunk

My sore and tender eyes extended up

Into its eaves,

The gentle tendrils swaying,

Sweeping with the breeze

And thought,

For what have I so feebly fought?

I’ve battled storms and hails and sun,

To fight a battle never won.

I fought to stop a weeping willow

From its namesake keeping –

Keeping it not for its beauty nor its grace

But to wipe tears off of its face.

To save it I have bravely fought

And realised I fought for – what?

To stop a Weeping Willows weeping.