I make my way along the lane
Wondering if my thoughts are sane
Why choose this path so late at night
While birches sway in pale moonlight?
With fairy visions in my head
I pass this way, a wary tread
As in a dream, I walk this night
While birches sway in pale moonlight
I fear that I may never know
What secrets lie in these shadows
When it would seem that all’s not right
While birches sway in pale moonlight
For does this dream, this mystery
Belong to me, or to the trees?
The truth, it seems, eludes my sight
While birches sway in pale moonlight
Jane Dougherty’s Poetry Challenge #33: Dreaming Trees provides a painting and an option to use any of these words: moonlight, tread, wary, secret and sway, as well as a request to write a kyrielle. I’ve managed to meet all three parts of the challenge.
Kyrielle ~ a poem of at least 3 quatrains, with lines of 8 syllables and a rhyme pattern of aabB, ccbB, ddbB, etc. The fourth line of the first stanza is used as the fourth line of each succeeding stanza
Image source: Art-Search.info (Moonlit Night, Highway by Isaac Illich Levitan)
rivrvlogr 
You capture that unsettling feeling I have with the image of trees in moonlight. It’s as though they are beings of the day and at night, they become something else.
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And we are but elements in their dreams.
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Trees must have awful nightmares then.
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lol
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Lovely, and unsettling. I especially like the last stanza.
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Thank you! 🙂
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I like this. I think the first stanza can stand alone as a poem in itself.
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I love your last stanza. I’m reading Lord of the Rings (again!) with my boy, so I think I know what trees dream about…
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🙂
Setting things right.
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Very evocative. I’ve walked down that same lane. When I was a child I would not go there for fear of what lurked there. (I hope you don’t mind but I would have preferred the second line of the third stanza to read “What secrets lie in their shadow.” I don’t know if one is allowed to make such comments on a blog)
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Thank you for the suggestion. It flows just as well, or better. I’ve just finished a revision of the poem to fit a slightly different form that has only three quatrains and a couplet. To do that, I’ve removed that third verse and inserted “secret” into the second verse. I’ll post that shortly.
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