Forests are complex systems that scientists have not yet fully deciphered. Trees communicate through the network formed by their roots and help each other survive by sharing nutrients. It seems, sometimes, that trees have great wisdom.
It is difficult to know if they are essentially mysterious or if the collective imagination has represented them that way. In any case, that is irrelevant. What matters is the experience that each person has with them, and how they give them meaning.
Each of the following poems not only offers a way to connect with trees but also unfolds a new interpretive universe. And the most beautiful thing of all is that for each person who reads one of these poems, there will be a new way of thinking about (and with) the world.
Tree At My Window
Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963)
Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head is so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
I don’t call the dead by name
Reza Mohammadi
I DO NOT CALL the dead by name
but one by one I’m putting them
on the tree of the deceased:
inwards it grows,
the sun gilts its roots
and its fruits are a fertile limbo
of old words.
Song of the Trees
Mary Colborne-Veel (1861-1923)
We are the Trees.
Our dark and leafy glade
Bands the bright earth with softer mysteries.
Beneath us changed and tamed the seasons run:
In burning zones, we build against the sun
Long centuries of shade.
We are the trees,
Who grew for man’s desire,
Heat in our faithful hearts, and fruits that please.
Dwelling beneath our tents, he lightly gains
The few sufficiencies his life attains—
Shelter, and food, and fire.
We are the Trees
That by great waters stand,
By rills that murmur to our murmuring bees.
And where, in tracts all desolate and waste,
The palm-foot stays, man follows on, to taste
Springs in the desert sand.
We are the Trees
Who travels where he goes
Over the vast, inhuman, wandering seas.
His tutors we, in that adventure brave—
He launched with us upon the untried wave,
And now its mastery knows.
We are the Trees
Who bear him company
In life and death. His happy sylvan ease
He wins through us; through us, his cities spread
That like a forest guard his unfenced head
‘Gainst storm and bitter sky.
We are the Trees.
On us the dying rest
Their strange, sad eyes, in farewell messages.
And we, his comrades still, since earth began,
Wave mournful boughs above the grave of man,
And coffin his cold breast.
The walker-fragment
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to talk to them and knows how to listen to them, discovers the truth. They do not preach doctrines or recipes. They preach, indifferent to detail, the original law of life.
The tree says: in me there is hidden a core, a light, a thought. I am life of eternal life. Unique is the purpose and the experiment that the eternal mother has done with me. Unique are my form and the folds of my skin, just as unique is the humblest set of leaves on my branches and the smallest wound on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest marks.
The tree says: my strength is confidence. I don’t know anything about my parents and I don’t know anything about the thousands of children that are born to me every year. I live, until the end, the secret of my seed and I worry about nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my mission is sacred. And I live from this trust.
Faithful Forest
Alberto Rios
I will wait, said wood, and it did.
Ten years, a hundred, a thousand, a million—
It didn’t matter. Time was not its measure,
Not its keeper, nor its master.
Wood was trees in those first days.
And when wood sang, it was leaves,
Which took flight and became birds.
It is still forest here, the forest of used-to-be.
Its trees are the trees of memory.
Their branches—so many tongues, so many hands—
They still speak a story to those who will listen.
By only looking without hearing, you will not hear the trees.
You will see only hard stone and flattened landscape,
But if you’re quiet, you will hear it.
The leaves liked the wind, and went with it.
The trees grew more leaves, but the wind took them all.
And then the bare trees were branches, which in their frenzy
Made people think of so many ideas—
Branches were lines on the paper of sky,
Drawing shapes on the shifting clouds
Until everyone agreed that they saw horses.
Wood was also the keeper of fires.
So many people lived from what wood gave them.
The cousins of wood went so many places
Until almost nobody was left—that is the way
Of so many families. But wood was steady
Even though it was hard from loneliness. Still,
I will wait, said wood, and it did.