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.
findingtimetowrite 