Rag Tree Equine Assisted Learning

The Rag Tree



As you travel about Ireland you will from time to time come across a tree or bush by the roadside completely covered in rags or scraps of clothing, you have found a ‘rag tree’. The custom of hanging rags on trees is an ancient Irish healing custom.

Rag trees are special places with a mystical reputation. Usually the rags are placed there by people who believe that if a piece of clothing from someone who is ill, or has a problem of any kind, is hung from the tree the problem or illness will disappear as the rag rots away. Sometimes the rag represents a wish or aspiration which will come to pass as the rag rots.

 
"THE RAG TREE" by TOM MCFADDEN from THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW 109

Wrapped in ancient allusion,
I stare feelings through a rear window
toward the strange, arboreal beckoning
of what seems my celtic tree.

While I stare through the back of modernity
toward that looming structure,
alive yet atavistic,
remembrance evokes a rag tree
of ancient Ireland,
where, upon the boughs availing
of that singular, special tree,
strips of colored cloth were draped
by those worry-weighted
in fragile supplication
for relief from moments fortune-fallen.

When next an ominous overcast
usurps and fills my modern sky,
I may travel through the back door of modernity,
unseen and unexplaining,
traveling backward to the site
where rises the dramatic oak,
and with a hand
that may be trembling, worry-weighted
…drape a colored rag across the strongest branch.
2010 Rag Tree Equine Assisted Learning.