Hairy bark of the redwood tree,
as copper poured into the dark dirt,
your sapwood to heartwood,
bard of the trees lining
a drunken coast with your forest
Peering inside your tissue
I see chloroplasts ladders
linked by doors and gates
your city as one, feeling through
the dirt, another tree, another species
You, the hinge.
A conifer’s tower of spiraling branches
another year another turn,
Your beards whisper down to root,
into dirt, anchoring wide
your tongues, your ears.
There calls bird,
falls seed, into duff,
silent rings concentrically
recording—
I do not wish to feel all that you feel,
I am no expert on your canopy
or cones but I know this:
You are a momentum of many
not a solitary thing.
And when I lean my back into you,
asking if I feel your pulse, wondering
if I feel your heat, I am asking
if I feel my own.
Where once I quickly climbed up,
and hung upside down from the lowest limb,
or strung a rope and swung free,
I ask you now to show me my place
in the order of things,
Remind my midsection’s tire
of the O of the tire swing,
navel down
a plumb finding center,
body and spirit,
a door on a hinge
like a name to a thing,
call me into being.
𐫱
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Shradha Shah works as an Emergency Medicine physician in San Francisco. During off-hours she dedicates her time to poetry, drawing, and outdoor adventures. She loves to write by hand with ink and the feel of charcoal on paper when drawing from the figure. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street Press, Lotus Magazine and Watchword Press.
About the Poem
“I was thinking of Hopkins's sprung rhythm mind, when I wrote “Redwood spell”. I had just read “Inversnaid” and the sound of stressed syllables in pairs: This darksome burn, horse back brown— its incantatory quality full of rollicking sounds seeped into my own poem. I also love the experience of micro- and macrocosm in a single line of verse.
Muir Woods National Park is not far from my home and is one of the last remaining remnant tracts of coastal redwoods. They are a source of constant inspiration and part of my creative landscape. I hunger for the forest, for the low hanging clouds of cold humid air that the trees exhale. The redwoods are so tall, that from the ground, it is impossible to see their crown. It is difficult to fathom a tree’s age, even seeing it in cross-section. The inner ring closest to the phloem goes the furthest back in history, centuries. Walking in the redwoods I feel the sponginess of the dirt over the vast networks of their roots reminding me that many stories have passed between these giants and through them. The gift of writing the poem was to experience the redwood tree as a portal—how it was not an ode to an object of adoration but to a living being not well understood by our kind, from another time and realm.”