Sunday Trees + Experimental Tree Plantation

Eighty Years

You’ve stood for eighty years, rooted

searching for your lost love
limbs outstretched in an empty embrace.

As seedlings, after the fire,

did you entwine,
only to have your better half,
your other self,
twin, mate, comrade
taken from you?

Now, like a lover sensing a cooling bed,

who in his sleep seeks across the vacant air,
your limbs await.

Such a tree ...

Such a tree as you could lead the march from Birnam Wood to Dunsinane:

your limbs lifted in signal forward, victory is ours.

Then again, your whirling arms could be a frozen dervish, mid-spin, mid-ecstasy,

enraptured in worship of your Lord.

Or you could be some Nessie of the hillside,

siren limbs luring sailors to the woods of their doom.

Perhaps you are the cursed one, forgotten,

longing for a supernatural reprieve, the maid who roused jealousy in a fatal flirt?

But no, you are a tree: the spirit of these ancient mountains,

ancestor, life-giver, cradle of a secret world. 

You stand high amongst your lesser sprouts,

mere saplings to your mighty rule.

Experimental Tree Plantation

If you would like to offer your own response to this Sunday Tree (or the previous ones), as an experiment, I am offering a ‘Mr Linky’.  Please link your ‘tree post’ rather than your blog, and link back to this Sunday Tree.

I look forward to wandering in your woods.

Isabel

PS I've never used this Linky-thing so only hope it works!  If it doesn't leave me a message and I'll try again.