Living Tree Poetry

Everything is fluid
when we think of it.

We are more water than substance.
And it pours from us,
in tears, blood, sweat.

In our passions,
in the heat of love,
in the waste released.

Ever liquid in, out.
Mingling together
as river’s meeting,

in the giving of our lives over
to one another.
Each day’s pleasure and pain

asks for our immersion,
in our tending of the young,
the infirm.

We cannot escape the truth
that in life’s basic needs we sink,
or swim.

That while we might dry our hands,
our affluence has a way of shielding us
from this –

this reduction again to water,
that we ever drawing
and releasing.

Ever giving ourselves up to,
as it carries us along.

Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
July 2020