Today’s poem is drawn from an article in “Smithsonian” magazine, March 2018, “The Whispering of the Trees” by Richard Grant.

I’m a tree hugger, especially in the redwood forests, but also in my own yard.  I talk to them, feel their spirits, and once I was hugged by them.  In my backyard under a starry sky waiting for my dogs to take care of their business, I was communing and was hugged.  Once in 70 years and that was amazing enough to be ok.  Not that I’d ever refuse any kind of hug.

I worry about the loner trees in my new yard.  Am working hard to bring them in companions.

So I wanted to do a poem on this article which shows that science is only now starting to understand trees (I think, always, of the redwoods, sister trees who depend on each other for survival) and that it is not “woo-woo” it is science.  Believe what you will.

Trees and We

Alive, moving in spans that do not fit human time, trees
share friendships through entertwined arrangements of roots,
grow so as to allot available light, are so interdependent they
may die, one soon after the other.  With networks of mycorrhizal

they speak to each other of distress, disease, draught and
then alter their actions based on those alerts.  Once
a forest keeper found a half-century old stump that was still
green inside, nourished by the beeches around it – like elephants

the younger trees were reluctant to abandon their dead. We
people might scoff, but giraffes browse acacias into the breeze
so that the ethylene gas alarm does not reach the other trees
which will load up leaves with enough gas to be deadly.  A giraffe

will walk a precise distance to reach trees that have not been apprised
by wind born missives, while caterpillars eating elms are less lucky when
attacked by wasps drawn by provocative pheromones, and
trees being consumed by deer defend with bitter chemicals – but

send  healing substances when the branch is broken and not
eaten.  Instead of reducing trees, and humans, and all the rest
to individual parts, we could look at the entirety, the system, learn
to ask questions that will give us answers about how things

interconnect, where we fit in that puzzle, how entities evolve to work
for a common cause; we can seek to find ways to live together instead of
quarrels that separate; discover harmony, how the universe sings
to those who listen, find our haven on this beautiful planet where we abide.