Sigh, sough, bend low…

Sigh, sough, bend low,
sing a song of sorrow:
I hold your branch
and feel the wrench
of what may come tomorrow.

Reach high, shield eye
join hands above me:
your branches bare
in bud this year
and ever after? Maybe.

I yearn, will learn
to spring forth like bracken
underfoot,
like peat, like soot
I pray to green, not blacken.

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Written for earthweal

This week, Sherry asks us in her challenge, ‘The Age of Loneliness’ to:

Write about this loneliness, about endlings, about the solastalgia we experience from the impact of environmental change, as we ponder the species who are vanishing from our world at an astonishing rate, almost as fast as the glaciers are melting.

Yesterday was Mothering Sunday, and I spent some time in the Lake District, noticing trees, being grateful for them, and thinking about the many environmental threats they face as a result of our actions. I held the branch seen in the central photo, and felt the weight of its heavy soughing, its sighing. Yes, I am a tree-hugger. Unashamedly so.

Coincidentally (if there are any true coincidences), today’s entry in the wonderful Word Perfect by Susie Dent, is ‘Book.’ She notes:

“The history of the book is inextricably intertwined with trees, in ways that extend far beyond the production of paper. The original word, in Old English, was spelt boc, ‘beech’, for it was on the bark of that tree, or upon beechwood itself, that runes were cast and inscriptions engraved…

“It seems entirely appropriate that the tree — whose name shares an ancient root with ‘true’, because truth is loyalty, steadfastness, and solidity — was the birthplace for books.” — Susie Dent, Word Perfect (John Murray Press, 2020), p. 90.

It is high time we began to reciprocate such loyalty…