Tree Poetry

Abhra Pal is hosting us over at dVerse Poets Pub and inviting us to write about trees, to think, be and feel tree. I always have to think about Ogden Nash’s tongue-in-cheek approach to tree poetry:

I think that I shall never see 
a billboard lovely as a tree. 
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, 
I’ll never see a tree at all.

For a diverse and interesting take on this prompt, please visit the other poets at the Pub. But here is a rough writing exercise about the tree in my garden. And no, I don’t know what kind of tree it is. I told you I am the world’s worst gardener, right?

 

I’m not good with names,

but I never met a tree I didn’t like.

This one is a toddler:

it greens so easily at the first blush of spring.

Shot up a metre when I looked away,

no longer hugged by the window frame.

Unruly and curly,

messy and fussy,

now a badly coiffed teenager windswept on all sides,

then a woman’s cascading morning glory,

promise of nights to come.

Leaves are gnarled and twisted too,

they sing the blues, over smoky-voiced guitars in distant jazz-clubs.

Skinny branches twist in painful shapes,

not quite weeping willow.

They arch up against gravity

with just occasional droops.

A fearless tree, shaking its mane

against a backdrop of mountains.

A sapling with just as much claim to eternity

as the Jurassic stones behind it.