Replanting the Great Caldonian Forest by Simon Kewin

In those days, Scots Pines lawned the Highlands
The Mesolithic Marten that ran through the branches
Could see both seas and never leave the touching leaves
Of giant cathedralling trees, shepherding their green,
Endless, restless hush, that rustled with death and life
>

With only island peaks visible above the flood
The Cairngorm Archipelago, the Cuillin Ridge Atoll
Until, in that first great clearance of the land,
By axe and ovine tooth, numberless trees fell one by one
Strewn like jackstraws, the devil playing at dominoes
>

Not that the mountains noticed the denudation
To them all living things are just fluff and dust
Titanic, elemental, their minds on bigger matters,
They grind each other's gradients, clash with the clouds,
Try to overtower the moon and pierce the sun
>

But sitting here on Sgurr an Airgid
It seems a shame all those trees are gone
And time that something was done
So I finish my apple and hurl the core,
Packed with its seeds, onto some fertile ground
And think to myself
That at least it's begun.

Simon Kewin, UK 

Manic is the Dark Night by Michael Lee Johnson

Deep into the forest
the trees have turned
black, and the sun
has disappeared in
the distance beneath
the earth line, leaving
the sky a palette of grays
sheltering the pine trees
with pitch-tar shadows.
It is here in this black
and sky gray the mind
turns psycho
tosses norms and pathos
into a ground cellar of hell,
tosses words out through the teeth.
"Don't smile or act funny,try to be cute
with me;how can I help you today
out of your depression?"
I fell jubilant, I feel over the moon
with euphoric gaiety.
Damn I just feel happy!
Back into the wood of somberness
back into the twigs,
sedated the psychiatrist
Scribbles, notes, nonsense on a pad of yellow paper
:"mania, oh yes, mania, I prescribe
lithium, do I need to call the police?"
No sir, back into the dark woods I go.
Controlled, to get my meds.
Twist and rearrange my smile,
crooked, to fit the immediate need.
Deep in my forest
the trees have turned black again.
To satisfy the conveyer.
The Lord of the dark wood.


Michael Lee Johnson, Chicago, USA

October ‘08 by Russell Jaffe

In a dream, we flew. Our fingers

were out like needles, and we

drifted up as we looked at them.

Weeks ago, we stood in an apple

orchard and condemned that city from
which we couldn’t afford to leave,

I climbed in my nice shoes and the

wet bark scraped and marked my

pants and purple sweater. As you smiled

big up at me, I tossed the apples down

and you caught them, smiling and wincing,

the tiny marks around your eyes disappearing

under the fat, green apples that padded the ground
like cork hitting a plaster wall. You asked me:

what if I had to take a bite from every apple in
the orchard?

You chewed an apple loudly.

The orchard went until

the forest abruptly stopped it, and the hills
of New York went off until they were smoky

and gone. All those trees had all the apples.
We came across rows of peppers growing

and, looking down at them, I pointed spiky

and told you what kinds of peppers they were.

The rows led right up to the apples on the ground
and in the trees, and you smiled and walked,

and I hated that I had to pay for all this.
The air had just the right bite to it.

I can’t even imagine those apples,

emergency red and green as the outskirts of a bruise,

the orchard itself: the number, the amount, is imaginative and lofty.

None of us can even imagine how deep we’re in

Russell Jaffe, Iowa, USA

Listen by Rae Spencer

Can you hear the whales?

Long slow sea chanteys
Rhythm paced by the meter of waves
Graceful arcs of melody
Race with neap voices
Toward the shore

Living swells of tidal muses
With curls of seafoam tresses

Refrains shatter into salty spray
Spill notes upon the sand
And slip inside wind

In graceful prism arcs
Whalesong leaves the sea

To lisp among trees
Where rustling leaves
Keep company with time

Can you hear the wolves?

Long slow forest choruses
In unnamed minor keys
Filled with promised futures
Hunger weaves through molting trees
Down and down to seas

These breathing moonlit muses
Swell their throats with lore

A choir of hunters
Eyes and ears and tongues uplifted
Return the sea’s salt voice

An ebbing echo of whales
Rolls across the shore

And between these native singers
All the wisdom born in time
Falls with autumn’s leaves


Rae Spencer, Virginia, USA

The Death of Trees by Josephine Shaw

When we woke the wind had dropped,
but power out, clock stopped, six huge elms
lay splayed all around the village pond -
two hundred years of swagger drained away.

And we pronounced them dead,
impressed the death of trees seemed
so much bigger than ours could be.
The earth keeps moving.

So memories of heavy horses, brasses shining,
a momentary vogue for Dutch barn building
(sandstone brick, pale Georgian paint),
or Shelley’s local popularity,

the coming and going of damp smoke,
the hug of village life, or young men
mustering for drill beneath the shade
(imagining Kipling, finding Arras),

were all left hanging in a point in space,
soft voices dead, in the unaccustomed sound of quiet.


Josephine Shaw, London, UK

Lignite by Andrew McCallum Crawford

You dig it up.

It’s been buried for years –
millions of them.
It used to be trees.
They must have been beautiful.

You burn it.

The smoke makes patterns.
Dark blue on sky blue.
People see things.
Beautiful things.
Some people

claim to see trees.

Others stare into the ashes

Trying to rekindle the memory
Of a moment’s warmth.

Andrew McCallum Crawford, Scotland

A Letter to the First Graders of 2100 by Kasandra Larsen

In Yosemite National Park, we are saying goodbye to the oldest and largest trees;
they must be gone by now. This was a protected place, meaning the vanishing
of branches happened slower. Once upon a time, America was beautiful, blanketed

in green, ripe for harvest because everywhere is virgin territory if you draw the map
yourself. That's what our ancestors thought as they chopped, burnt, built their houses,
made this paper. That was the beginning. Worse came later. At first we were

industrious, not fat. We invented improvements to horses and feet, upgraded to sleek
and shiny cars that idled for hours every year on flat black landscapes, highways
with tiny pines shoved off to the side. Innocents who inherited the earth, still young,

still meek, have you been to the graveyards, hangars full of big tin cans with wings
that flew us almost everywhere we wanted? We never did find new planets with plenty
of trees. Light bulbs were fired by electricity from plants burning coal. Even our

impressive architecture emitted carbon dioxide. Every city had a bunch of Burger
Kings, McDonald's; we raised thousands of heads of cattle for their supply, grew
abundances of rice, blew methane kisses to what we thought was an endless sky.


Kasandra Larsen, New Orleans, USA

The Sailor's Ear by M Kei

the trees
begin to talk,
tossing their green heads
and whispering
about the weather


sailor’s ear —
I hear the trees
whispering
and feel the cold touch
of premonition


the wooden ketch
and the old schooner
know the winds;
I watch them
watching the clouds


ashore,
Mardi Gras beads rattle
against the lamp
and remind me of
halyards in the storm



M Kei, Maryland, USA

Chiffchaff by Carol Thistlethwaite

6th April 2008 Withnell Fold


Even though snow is marbling the trees,
these chiff-chaff-chiff-chaff-chiffs are heard,
winding their spells through leafless worlds.
The steadiness of the chiff-chaff beat,
reassuring me that this flaky white
is no more than peeling old paint,
dead skin brushing off
as the season pulls on a new linen coat.
Chiff-chaff-chiff-chaff-chiff-chaff-chiff
charm from a distant land,
flamboyantly bowing its tail through the trees,
casting its hope with its hop-flick-hops,
dispelling the snow as it steadily goes,
chiff-chaff-chiff-chaff-chiff-chaff-chiff,
calling each leaf to stir in each bud,
unwavering herald that Earth really does
now tilt towards a North African sun.


Carol Thistlethwaite, Lancashire, UK

second avenue subway construction or: is there silence anymore in New York by Nanette Rayman Rivera

As my sweet sausages and peaches drop
through the construction pit, the air that anneals
ash accelerates over sludge, gives its body
to the workers of the chasm. When I moved
up here from lower Manhattan, far from hip portico,
I beamed at clean trees that marked this garden
of calm. Beyond my known coterie
of cool juice bars, fawned over lady boutiques:
all fierce I was, all claw and blade,
so unlike any sparrow who nests.

Regardless, I’ve been lost in the downy
slick of a woodpecker’s red head, lost in the bone
- coffined shins of sawed off trees. A new weeping
willow just de-catkined, its riled blonde like liver
disease stealing along the chain link fence
reveals a watermark in a disease of fatigue.
Silver-dollared Calendulas watercolor rats out of their league.

In any case I’ve been writing about surrender—
I wonder what being a bird is like – wings,
clap loudly compasses, outskirts and ruffles of down
Ring Neck Doves, white lips on tail feathers—
The ornithologist who plied bird liming, viscid, adhesive
substance for the sake of circumvallation.
That word is behind me now
along the construction, the brown
and cream round earth.
I’m a bird astonished by all the stars there are,
all frost and steel.
The one billion free razors of my reveries.
Ah! How I bleed.



Nanette Rayman Rivera, USA

Three haiku on Trees by Sandy Sue Benitez

Maple shakes her curls
covering the naked earth
with shawls of copper


Crabapples fall hard
crashing into frosted soil
red comets on fire


Kites float in gold skies
paper leaves tied with ribbon
tree roots envious


Sandy Hiss, Wyoming, USA


These haiku are now featured on November's Festival of the Trees.

Arboles / Tree Cycle by Eugenia Andino

1.
El cielo pesa el doble,
La lluvia es el doble de gris
cuando llueve sobre las palmeras.

The sky is twice as heavy,
Rain is twice as grey,
when it falls on the palm trees.

2.
Sólo falta un tono de verde en Cornell:
Plata mate del olivo.

The only shade of green Cornell misses:
Dull silver of olive trees.

3.
Una llama, fuegos artificiales,
Abanicos rojos, una sorpresa.
Una platanera en un jardín.

A flame, a firework,
Red fans, a surprise.
Banana tree in a garden.

4.
La mece el aire,
jacaranda plumosa.
Sueña que es pájaro

Swaying in the breeze,
Feather-leaved jacaranda:
it dreams it's a bird.

5.
En estas calles mías
los ginkgos extienden sus ramas.
me saludan, estos amigos míos,
elegantes damas con abanicos,
niños que quieren abrazos.

Along my streets,
The ginkgoes spread their branches.
They greet me, my friends,
Elegant ladies with fans.
Children throwing arms for hugs.


Eugenia Andino, Seville, Spain.
Translated by the author.

Snow Pilgrim by Arthur Durkee

Snow drives in around the porch edges. Puffs of whitegrained breath, fallen on uninsulated floors, to drift. The local definition of a blizzard asks how horizontal the snow falls. Green and white the red cardinal's shelter. Gray squirrel, puff-cheeked, clutches the topmost spruce bough, bouncing in the wind, to reach the tree's last cones. Rabbit tracks dash lines between trees.

a quiet rest
in between mountain hikes,
the trailman's lodge


Seeking a festival more quiet, more contemplative, the old poet ties up his knapsack, goes out into the snow, boots laced high over wool, hat and mittens braced upwind. Any direction as good, in this whiteout. Where the road shelfs over the cutbank of river's loop, he stops to watch heavy flakes streak through whipping blackoak branches across the oxbow slope. Memorizing calligraphy of lines of trees clouded behind snow, because too cold for inkstone and brush. Flakes tick on already frozen drifts, winds hiss the boughs, somewhere off upstream a bluejay shrieks. All other silences converge. Walking stick and knapsack, uproad, vanishing. Fade to white.

line of footfalls lost
under fresh fallen snow,
no one left to see




Arthur Durkee, USA

Grace by Eric Miller

Hunched over, chin pressed against his neck,
he pulls at his collar to stretch it across his
nose and mouth.

The watered earth below his feet gurgles with
each step, and the mist around him seems as
thick as the mud underfoot.

But, as the sun reaches up with a hand to pull
itself above the distant hill, a beam of light
finds its way through the atomized air, bringing
the first touch of brightness and warmth to the
day.

He fishes not for the trout under the cascading
water, but rather for the pen in his pocket. On a
small pad of paper, he writes the words he sees
spelled out as the trout move about, like his
fingers will, later, on his keyboard.

The sun’s rays dance like disco lights on the
water’s surface in concert with the movements
of the fish. The prism of water bathes the trees
in the shades of autumn.

Connected with the stream’s mud floor, its
dancing inhabitants, and the rippled ceiling
of water, he hears the words he has written
being read as his ashes are carried in the
familiar currents.

He is filled with the feeling of grace.




Eric Miller, Pennsylvania, USA

Subterranean Adagio by Denis Robillard

Ants perform a subterranean adagio
galaxies of blood burn inside you
night traffic flounders into an aural mess
a conveyor belt of easy amnesia
trees rustle like a leafy woman
adjusting her bangles.
Crickets play their sad black guitars
this late August night
here on the pavement
my shadow looms larger across this parking lot
looking for a better cell connection.
I said a better cell connection.


Denis Robillard, Canada

When The Sky Decides To Marry by William Soule

When the sky decides to marry
the earth, it will be winter. The snow
will be the rice thrown
by heaven's congregation of onlookers, angels
casting their trumpets aside
to sprinkle handfuls below. Snow
is silent this way; the summer thunderstorms
are brass instruments, the lower notes
vibrating the windows of every house.

It is understood that summer
is a woman demanding a divorce, the earth
a lazy man turning his back
towards the static-filled television set
of the sun. You must stay inside
those days, avoid trees.
They are hairs split
by crooked, strangle-shaped fingers
we confuse for lightning.



William Soule, Utah, USA

Along the Creek by Duncan Fraser

Sun shining down from a pale blue autumn sky,
white wisps of cloud move slowly in the breeze,
grass dry and bleached by drought and summer heat.

The tree-lined creek is nearly dry,
green puddles punctuate its muddy bed,
no rain in sight, they’ll soon be gone.

Small birds are hard to find,
a rufous whistler, three grey fans, a wren,
brown thornbill busy in the leaves.

Then through the trees above the paddock,
a harrier with upswept wings sails low
and then is gone, too soon to name.

A common brown the only butterfly to see,
no dragonflies or damsels catch the eye,
their season’s drawing to a close.

Wait, movement on a trunk across the creek,
a common shutwing perches for a time,
the dragonfly of autumn has emerged.

The big zoom lens is meant for birds,
but hold it steady, focus, shoot,
the shutwing flies, its image though remains.




Duncan Fraser, Australia

Moth Stream by Gary Every

The moon shines through my window at midnight
as I toss and turn, unable to sleep
but I am capable of dreaming plenty.
It is not the moon which keeps me awake
nor even the wind
which rattles the leaves in the trees
and shakes my window frame.
It is knowledge which gives me insomnia.
I have recently learned something startling.
Moths, tiny soft fuzzy winged insects,
can somehow sense the direction of the wind
and as the seasons change
so that the moths feel the need to migrate,
all the moths at once,
elevate a mile or two into the sky
where the breeze tosses the tiny airborne creatures
in the direction they wish to go,
hurling them swiftly,
as fast as sixty miles an hour.
How extraordinary it must be
to be so tiny and be flung so fast
and so far.
Do the moths have any grasp
of the massive geography they cover so quickly?
Outside my window nighttime flowers bloom,
trumpeting datura and white yuccas flickering atop their stalks
like candle flames,
beckoning for the moths to drop from the sky.
I lie awake at night unable to sleep
trying to imagine millions of moths
two miles above my bed
soaring through the air at sixty miles an hour,
cursed with insomnia
caught up in a streaming dream of moths.

Gary Every, Arizona, USA

Reflections by Duncan Fraser

Driving down to Bellbird Corner,
whippet tense with anticipation on the seat beside me,
sun shining down from a nearly cloudless sky,
yet it’s winter next week.

The dew’s still on the grass
but the earth is dry without the fickle rain,
it’s different now to when I was a boy on Bellbird Farm,
the weather’s changed.

Along the wombat track
the sound of spinebills’ beating wings is all around us,
the mistletoe’s in flower on dying blackwoods,
sweet nectar for the birds.

We’ve reached the river bend,
where riding in to school so many years ago
we heard bell tones, and looked to find the songsters in the trees,
they’re not there now.

Newry Creek is barely running,
a gentle trickle through the roots and logs,
clear tannic water green azolla frosted, soon to meet
the river’s muddy welcome.

A faint call lifts my head,
my first known raptor, a Whistling Kite,
head down, weaving lazy circles in the blue,
we called them eagles then.

Open the gate to let Jock through,
he doesn’t like the tight-strung wires,
the Golden Wattles by the fence are budding up already,
yet it’s winter next week.

To home now through the dips
once spanned by white-railed timber bridges,
it must be twenty years since they last saw a flood,
the weather’s changed.

Pause for a quiet look out north,
old Ben, rising blue on the far horizon,
whippet still hunting, like Toby sixty years ago,
some things never change.

Duncan Fraser, Australia

Beechbank Burn by Ross Wilson

We’d run by the burn when the burn
didn’t run at all. Stopped in summers youth,
low and still in the no flow time zone
when we had it all – warm summer light,
nights far off as the sea mouth gulping
greedy as a beer monster, our burn.

We didn’t know it crashing through bushes,
on the run across imaginary enemy-lines,
ducking behind NO DUMPING signs
people ignored to jettison their crap –
magpie-bairns salvaging scrap:
old washing machines concealed in leaves,

wheel-barrows, car seats, cupboards in trees . . .
One day we discovered old cassettes
from the fifties in bags beached by the burn –
compilations of voices recorded long before
we were born: discarded, flowing on
in the winter-gush fast-forwarding the burn –

archaic pop guddled by a new generation.
We ran against the current to an old soundtrack.


Ross Wilson, Scotland, UK