WHAT THE FOREST TOLD ME
The first thing I learned was that even stone remembers its root,
and the forest,
hearing my hesitation,
offered me its voice
not one voice but a thousand,
braided loose as a river,
each syllable arriving dressed in leaf and light.
A barbet corrected a hornbill mid-sentence,
wing brushing wing,
while termites conferred low along the ground.
I knelt to that murmuring parliament of ground,
and felt, beneath my palms, the old committee of root
debating slowly what the rain had meant.
A wing grazed my shoulder not fear,
just courtesy and a voice,
mossy and unhurried,
asked to borrow my light
for a poem she'd been composing
since before the river
had a name.
I said yes, and watched the whole river
lean in to listen,
its current pooling like held light at my feet.
Somewhere close, a fig tree's ancient root shifted,
made room,
the way an elder makes ground
for a newcomer at table.
I had never used my voice
so gently,
or been answered by so many kinds of wing.
A kingfisher settled its blue accounting of wing
and told me the local word for joy was river
agreeing with a stone.
I gave the moss my voice
back, changed, and she thanked me,
returned it to the ground
gently as compost,
gently as a root
released at last from wanting nothing but light.
Evening came down in long coins of light,
and every creature folded its particular wing
the way a sentence settles after its last root
has been spoken.
I understood then: this river,
this whole exuberant congress of ground,
had never once withheld its voice
only waited for mine.
I raised my voice
into that generous,
undivided light
and felt it taken up by branch and ground,
by moss and moth,
by every migratory wing,
until I was only one more tributary of the river,
one more grateful,
ordinary root.
Now when I speak,
some small green voice answers on the wing;
I carry that forest's light home like water carries a river;
and gladly, gladly,
I give my ground back to its root.
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