Living Tree Poetry

It is like cursive words upon the page,
this way we live beside,
linked but separate,
in running ink.

It’s like the tide
that turns back upon itself,
the curve of a wave ocean bound
becoming a long ribbon of river.

Or it’s like flax,
how in the hands of the weaver
it becomes a mat, or a kete,
a carrier.

Something greater
for its plaited strength.

And it’s like rope, three stranded,
or a knitted vest,
a comforter for the knees,
or the young.

And it’s a blanket
made from many threads,
under which our limbs, our arms
are words linking in cursive.

Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
November 2020


What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
~ Pericles

It was just when I was going to post this poem, that I also came across this beauty below:

Think of those Celtic monks who
scaled the slippery rocks carrying
vellum and inks while the sea broke

and battered beneath them. High
in a crevice, a hidden stone hut
with cot and candle. The scribe

dips and swirls his quill to preserve
the story—Luke’s genealogy,
name after name, letters shaped

like birds in every color, a flight
of messengers released into history.
Each word unfurls the promise,

like Gabriel kneeling. The body
knows that wings, like waves,
can break through walls and enter,

that the secret of the story
is love, that even as we sleep,
its tides carry us in a wild safety.

The poem “What the Body Knows” by Jean Janzen is from her collection What the Body Knows (DreamScape Books, 2015)