Just like a willow
we would cry an ocean
If we lost true love
and sweet devotion

This is a stanza from "It's Now or Never," immortalized by Elvis in 1960. It uses the figure and physiology of a weeping willow tree to convey the potential heartache that would follow the loss of newly-kindled and long-awaited love.

Here's an interesting anacdote: the bichemicals released from a weeping willow have been reported to produce feelings of euphoria to those resting beneath them on sunny days. That seems like an appropriate place to go to cry and feel better. Let us know if you have any related experiences.

by Tom Hennen, 2013

There are no creatures you cannot love.
A frog calling at God
From the moon-filled ditch
As you stand on the country road in the June night.
The sound is enough to make the stars weep
With happiness.
In the morning the landscape green
Is lifted off the ground by the scent of grass.
The day is carried across its hours
Without any effort by the shining insects
That are living their secret lives.
The space between the prairie horizons
Makes us ache with its beauty.
Cottonwood leaves click in an ancient tongue
To the farthest cold dark in the universe.
The cottonwood also talks to you
Of breeze and speckled sunlight.
You are at home in these
great empty places
along with red-wing blackbirds and sloughs.
You are comfortable in this spot
so full of grace and being
that it sparkles like jewels
spilled on water.

"For me, the Cottonwoods have an existential quality. Standing alone on the prairie, they take the full brunt of wind, storms, and lightning. They face all these hardships and unpredictability alone, yet as a result become stronger for it, and then can offer shelter to other wildlife in their branches and shade. Sounds a bit like the human experience!" 
-an excerpt from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems, 2013

​by Goen Tree Care's own arborist Chad Goen, 2019

The mosaic juniper
Gnarled and knotted
Once boasted an artist's mastery upon its column
Now stands in defiance of cruel time like that at the Colosseum
There behind some swindly new pines like a monument behind some new-age bakery
There it is - looming and half dead, but also very much alive
The sway, the green, the hidden creatures
They all boast of what was and is
Like us when donning nostalgia's lens

by Joyce Kilmer, 1913

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast:

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear 
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.