Tuesday Poem - In The Voice Of A Tree by Michelle Leber

IN THE VOICE OF A TREE

for Georgina King (1845-1932)

Do not marry if you wish to develop your talent

                                                          ― George Bennett

Her warm curve on my spine―

it’s like this each day. She’s reading

with her little sighs, pressing a book

to her hillocks, as if absorbing my ancestors

by way of brooding osmosis.

No one knows what she reads.

Some days she writes letters,

packing faultless flowers between paper

and lets the laughing dove take them

across meadows, over mountains,

to enter Mueller’s chamber as he sits

with Termination Lake specimens

in the drafty acreage of his esteem. 

No one knows what he reads.

A dandelion seed has taken sentry

in her hair. For the view. For companionship.

Ants devising better ways to reach honey,

by-pass the flighty blooms of her sleeve

that puff like batwings onto her page.

No one knows what she reads.

If I could, I’d insist she reconcile

her natural beauty. When her head

turns to a bee, rises on its tower to meet

with clouds, she is more than kindred:

how shall we commune, together admire

our mandate with petalite, tuff beds, fern allies.

I am bending my branches.

No one knows what she reads.

Note: First published in a different form by Westerly 57.2: Nov 2012 

  

Michelle Leber lives in Melbourne and is writing a series of poems about women naturalists. Each one I come across, either in journals, or when she reads them to us at various poetry events around town, or when she tables one at a monthly workshop at my place, I am entranced by their delicacy and pungency and cogency.