Enjoy this 2-minute poem or let me read it to you here.
In the clearing in the woods, she can drop her seeds so her children can grow tall and strong on copious sunlight; dig deep and grow broad so all the creatures can rest in their branches and all the fungus can weave their root tips into their neighbors.
The tree believes we live or die together; the stories we share and stores we gather bring us through far more than winters, but through floods and fires. Through anything but axes.
She remembers the time before they came when she could feel her cousins sigh two ridges over through particles shifting between her toes. But then the ships arrived with sharp metal and explosions, and after the ground stopped shaking – the silence.
No birds. No underground messages. There was only a clearing without any woods. Wind no longer in branches but rushing across bare earth.
So she does the only thing she knows to do: stretch broad to shelter what remains, dig deep to reweave the fractured networks, throw her seeds high and wide for there is enough sun here for hundreds of children.
And for all the creatures who nurse their gnostic secrets in dark and hidden places, and who will remerge when there is once more a place to call home.
Nancy
Discover more from InnerWoven
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Wow!! This is so beautiful and profoundly relevant to us all and to what’s happening in our world today. I will start visualizing this more around the world. Bridging those connections and healing what’s broken.
Thanks so much for this Nancy.
I’m so glad this resonated with you, Anjie! This came out of a stream-of-conscious writing prompt. I always marvel at the depth and comes out when my mind gets out of the way, stops trying to make a point, and just listens!
“She remembers the time before they came when she could feel her cousins sigh two ridges over through particles shifting between her toes,” shook me to the core because nature has this magnificent memory that in our short attention span society is really necessary to reawaken. Your poetry does that, rekindles a light inside the soul, the illumination of past stories, past wisdom, inscribing in the cranial folds with hieroglyphic history. Thank you for bearing the stories of the past!
What a beautiful reflection, Wyatt – thank you! I love when those timeless words rise up through me from bark and earth, so humbling and inspiring. I’m glad you heard them too.