I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichen and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
-- Mary Oliver
Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
-- Robert Frost
consider a tree whose seed was swept
across the landscape while it wept
and now
in distant soil is kept to grow
a solitary tree
against rocky shelf of mountainside
or in some cornfield, endless
wide
for it, adversity lasts long
and it must by itself be strong
no forest round to share the sting of angry sun
and pounding rain
it simply cannot take its ease by leaning
against other trees
i should think that from the start
in such a tree there dwells a heart
and soul
that though apart from other trees
finds solace in the beasts and breeze
and that its lonesome tenure yields
beholdeness
from peaks and fields
-- Carole Z. Spinelli
I have always felt the living presence
of trees
the forest that calls to me as deeply
as I breathe,
as though the woods were marrow of my bone
as though
I myself were tree, a breathing, reaching
arc of the larger canopy
beside a brook bubbling to foam
like the one
deep in these woods,
that calls
that whispers home
-- Michael S. Glaser
