SƠN TRUNG * SUFERING OF THE PLANTS

I am a tree, a simple tree.I live in Canada, which is the most wonderful country in the world. My voice is the voice of trees in the forests, and trees in the parks.My voice is also the voice of grass on the hills, vegetables on the farms, and flowers in the gardens.


A lot of people don't understand us. They think that we are insensible and inaniamate things. In fact, we aren't different from humain beings. We can eat and drink like people, so they have to water and fertilize us. Some of our brothers in Africa are anthropophagous.


As human beings are divided into men and women, men are loving women, and women loving men, so are we. Some of us are stamens, and others are pistils. We also have polination that like women's pregnancy.


We also exhale and inhale like human beings. If they inhale and exhale by mouth nad nose, we also do that with our leaves. We dismiss oxygen by day, and we send out carbondioxide and breathe oxygen by night.


We have a life. We were born, we grow up and some day we'll be dead. We have a history. We have a past, present and future. We also have our families, our ancestors, our parents, our brothers and sisters.We have a lot of friends too. We need to love and to be loved. We are different from stones, which are very different, cold and motionless. We have soul and sentiment. Among the poets in the world, we love Chataubriand- a French poet in the 19th century-very much, because he understood us.He said that trees, stones,rivers,lakes... have had a soul and his soul and ours were related in perception and sentiment:


"Inanimate objects, do you have a soul
That attaches to ours and force us to love them?"


We have joy and sadness. We are in hope and sometimes in disappointment. Spring is the most beautiful season in the year. It is the happiest time in our life. The sky is bright and the sun shines. The weather is wonderful and we are very fine. The birds sing in the sky and we smile with our beautiful flowers. We are very happy when we see couples hand in hand walking in the parks.


We are also happy in the summer. Everybody leaves his winter coat , his hat and his boots. They go to the parks, to the beaches with light clothing. It is the time we give them a lot of flowers, fruits,vegetables.


After summer comes autumn. A lot of poets, writers praise autumn. They describe the beauty of autumn, especially the fall in Canada. They are very happy when they see trees leaves change color from green to yellow, and from pink to red. In fact, they don't understand us. They are happy before our pain, our sadness,our disappointment. Autumn is the beginning of our sorrow, our death.Indeed, Phåm Duy, a Vietnamese music composer ,understood us when he wrote the song entitled" The Dead Autumn". People like red, pink and yellow color, but we don't. We only love the color green because it is our natural color,our fine color.People say that green is color of hope.Sure ! Green is our color of life. Other colors are signs of sickness, of death. For human beings,multicolors are good, but we hate it. Why? Because the weather changes in fall. In summer, the weather is about 20-30 degree.It is very good for human beings, animals and plants. But when the autumn comes, the weather is about 0 to -10. We cannot undergo this terrible weather. We begin to fade. We begin to struggle against this miserable condition, so we begin to change color. When winter comes,we are really dead or nearly dead. Our leaves fall day by day. Finally, we stand alone with dry and dead branches in the snow except pines, a kind of evergreen tree.My friends- vegetables and grass are more miserable. Vegetables on the farms are now really dead while grass has disappeared under the thick layer of snow.


What we have just said to you is to prove that we have sentiment and soul. We also have reason.
Sometimes we are very upset because of the hard condition of life, but we aren't pessimistic. We realize that life has its ups and downs, but it's important to get through hard times and to make the best of every situation. After the rain, the sun shines. After winter, comes spring. It is warmer, and the snow begins to melt, Grass on the hills and on the roads appear with a green color. Trees in forests and parks have new buds. Flowers are blooming everywhere. A new life comes back to us and to everybody. We enjoy the warmth of sunlight in spring and summer which compensate everybody for the sad and dead fall and winter.



Sơn Trung