Forest Meditation

A poem from my writing course at St. Basil's College of Writing

This was done as part of our professor Paul Kingsnorth’s course, Rewilding Your Words. Please subscribe to read the full piece.

Release now the song of the tree frog, the cricket
Shake the raindrops onto the path, and not the path’s edge
Let the river calm into ripples so the deep boulders can be seen from the clifftop
Grey skies, lower your mist onto this mountain top and nourish us from the summer’s drought

We will offer the year’s last flush of green even while
We suck the vigor back into stems and trunks for winter food
Even while we leave the reds and golds to romance the lichens
Before the harvest falls to the ground

Insulating the burrow for the field mouse
Softening the tunnel mound of the vole
Sweetening the juice of the sassafras for a hungry doe
The crows may caw their antiphon now

Nevermind the shouts of uncouth blind hikers
Prepare instead for those who know how to be still as us
Who are content with dew permeating the cobweb
Between branchlets of a fallen pine twig
Reveal the capillary network of roots, coursing life through our heart and lung
And we will allow our rhythms to slowly sync

Here is one who is part of us,
Born where the old stories were born.
She fears the bear, the coy-wolf
But we will tell them instead to bring her food
Honey, honeysuckle, acorn, blackberry.

We will push stones up from the soil, and she
May build a hut, small and light
She might loosen the packed trail and let us
breathe. She might plant a garden.
She may cultivate a weak birch with the ash from her hearth-fire
Warm our ground with the heat of the house-stones

But today, before all of this,
She will allow her breath to slow, let us feel the
slight off-beat her heart makes, that keeps
her attention on the humus beneath the autumn
leaves, which she must become.

Aware that beech will grow richer over the place where she will lie
Remembered not by others like her, but always alive in us.
No poison ivy will grow in that ground—she repelled it—
We withdrew its bitter liquor when she passed.