Writings / Poetry: Russell Thornton

The Praise Tree

I

Gusts run through the sapling and it shivers and sways,
the leaves lift delicate green, glittering silver,
settle shadow-dark, lift green and silver again,
and the tree is an actress on a stage,
swooning, flinging her hands to the sky. In this play
the bodily motion is beyond measurement
and the speech beyond hearing, it is all the tree’s
single intricate electric charge and flow. The sorrow
in this one in the lead role so full of finding,
and of being found, the joy so full of searching,
the leaves are castanets she clicks while wind
undresses her of matter, dresses her in spirit, undresses
and dresses her again many times every minute
as in a wedding dance of the visible and invisible.

II

Because of a chance wind and chance open window
near a well-travelled street, I have become an audience,
the young actress is familiar to me, and the tall tree,
I understand now, is the small potted tree that vanished
from my grandmother’s room in the care centre
while she lay in the hospital and we combed out
her long hair and spoke into her ear, telling her
that it was all right, she could let go. The leaves flash
with her senses though her old life is gone,
and she is in a play again circa nineteen-thirty,
and it is a play she could never have acted in until now
though it was always within the play of her life,
and she is alive in the role and cannot know it, as the tree
cannot know she is the way it lives in the wind.

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