Gill Horitz
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Remembering
we drove, a charabanc
of women, one familial Sunday,
and saw thirty beeches skittled
by the wind. And grandmother
cried, seeing their gristle of
roots and the chalk white blood
thickening at the stumps as we
five daughters watched, our hair
blowing wild, and the day
not yet become a memory.
But where does it go, this fact
of trees? By five, hijacked
into vapour; only a rumour remains
haphazard as a page wind-tossed
and chased. Oh,
there was never this trickery
in her laboratory; physics was
a calm climate, crystals
in white dishes,
no unreasonable storm.
And now there’s no trace
of how we stood in the tree’s crown,
in the labyrinth of new wood.
To test for life we split
the sad buds with our nails
and found inside a green
visceral shine of something
dying. So like her filigree
thoughts, rummaged without reason,
And all that matters alive
but dying.
Published in Writing Women and Places of Poetry