Birch Tree Best Quotes

Lucy's eyes began to grow accustomed to the light, and she saw the trees that were nearest her more distinctly. A great longing for the old days when the trees could talk in Narnia came over her. She knew exactly how each of these trees would talk if only she could wake them, and what sort of human form it would put on. She looked at a silver birch; it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face, and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his face and hands, and hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah!- she would be the best of all. She would be a precious goddess, smooth and stately, the lady of the wood.

Kyra stood atop the grassy knoll, the frozen ground hard beneath her boots, snow falling around her, and tried to ignore the biting cold as she raised her bow and focused on her target. She narrowed her eyes, shutting out the rest of the world—a gale of wind, the sound of a distant crow—and forced herself to see only the skinny birch tree, far-off, stark-white, standing out amidst the landscape of purple pine trees. At forty yards, this was just the sort of shot her brothers couldn’t make, that even her father’s men couldn’t make—and that made her all the more determined—she being the youngest of the bunch, and the only girl amongst them. Kyra had never fit in. A part of her wanted to, of course, wanted to do what was expected of her and spend time with the other girls, as was her place, attending to domestic affairs; but deep down, it was not who she was. She was her father’s daughter, had a warrior’s spirit, like he, and she would not be contained to the stone walls of their stronghold, would not succumb to a life beside a hearth. She was a better shot than these men—indeed, she could already outshoot her father’s finest archers—and she would do whatever she had to to prove to them all—most of all, her father—that she deserved to be taken seriously. Her father loved her, she knew, but he refused to see her for who she was. Kyra did her best training far from the fort, out here on

GOAT HOUR GOSPEL (SUCH SALVAGE) BY MARK WAGENAAR   Just as the evening’s about to move on, they appear, not as the apparitional deer— here, & gone in the next moment, without a sound—but one by one, bumbling through briar, chewing through poison ivy, sniffing at trees. A slow procession walking beneath elms & birches that hold up the last light. And you’re alone with the traces of things, the news in front of you: the crooked skeleton of Richard III was dug up from a parking lot, humpbacked, once buried in his boots & battlefield wounds. Nearby a lost river has been uncovered, & coughed up its mouthful of Roman skulls. No relic is safe, it seems, from an invisible tide that presses them upward. Sometimes it’s not the loss that hurts but the indignities of the discovery. And yet beside the diggers & builders of new things is this mangy congregation, pushing through the scrub without a trail or blueprint or direction. Their dirty white fur shines a little in this late, lost hour. They bleat as they shamble & piss on each other without warning, or maybe as a warning, or in greeting. They’ll eat anything—tin can, T-shirt, canvas sack, bones of animals & kings, & carry them awhile. And so do we: each night, across the country, people turn up at hospitals unable to speak, for the needle or nail lodged in their throats. They’re unable to explain why, but we know— that desperate mix of need & panic that can drive us to keep something safe for good. These dearest items take your words & leave them luminous, radiolucent, shining on the X-ray, like this swallowed ring: a ghostly eclipse. Small comfort to share an appetite with these goats, this dishevelled lot. But a comfort, too, to know that some things will be saved from the soil, rescued from time’s indignities, if only for a little while, & by these scruffy reliquaries, on the other side of the valley now, flickering slightly as they near the vanishing point of the timberline. And we might call such salvage mercy . And it must be even for the undeserving, for those of us who didn’t live right, or live best. Whatever that means. Mercy will find us, even when we fail to recognize it, when we least expect it.