When I am no longer alive, Will a forest grow around me? Will my chest spawn lichen? Will the rhythm of the day And the rhythm of the night Become one eternal oscillation? A whirring sensation? Light through a damselfly’s wing? Will time slow? Will I finally have the space
“Trees fall. We know that. But we don’t expect to be there, to stand beneath with open mouth to see the lean begin. Down it comes like a slow-motion hammer stroke. In a rush of swooshing branches, the tunnel of darkness closes in and the roar settles to silence. Such peace. I have stumbled into someone else’s heaven: the afterlife of cedars, the paradise of firs.””
So, this is what it’s like to pass through that door, across the threshold of being. The pearly gates are framed by moss-draped firs. I am surrounded by the pillars of ancient trunks backlit by overwhelming radiance. I listen to celestial harps and hear thrushes singing and the music of a distant brook. I see no angels but the moss is a pillow of green cloud.
I assumed there was a bright line between the living and the dead, a boundary we cross but twice, once on our way into life and once on our way out. But here the line is blurred. In the afterlife of cedars, nothing is ever dead.”
I truly enjoyed your poem and your word choice in every piece :)
Thanks. I read 'Braiding Sweetgrass', and especially liked her comments on plantain:
Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu, and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others’ homes and growing without regard to limits. But Plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native. It has earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous but “naturalized.” This is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country.
From Robin Wall Kimmerer
“Trees fall. We know that. But we don’t expect to be there, to stand beneath with open mouth to see the lean begin. Down it comes like a slow-motion hammer stroke. In a rush of swooshing branches, the tunnel of darkness closes in and the roar settles to silence. Such peace. I have stumbled into someone else’s heaven: the afterlife of cedars, the paradise of firs.””
So, this is what it’s like to pass through that door, across the threshold of being. The pearly gates are framed by moss-draped firs. I am surrounded by the pillars of ancient trunks backlit by overwhelming radiance. I listen to celestial harps and hear thrushes singing and the music of a distant brook. I see no angels but the moss is a pillow of green cloud.
I assumed there was a bright line between the living and the dead, a boundary we cross but twice, once on our way into life and once on our way out. But here the line is blurred. In the afterlife of cedars, nothing is ever dead.”
I truly enjoyed your poem and your word choice in every piece :)
From her essay “becoming earth”
Thanks. I read 'Braiding Sweetgrass', and especially liked her comments on plantain:
Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu, and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others’ homes and growing without regard to limits. But Plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native. It has earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous but “naturalized.” This is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country.
A beautiful musing.
Thank you.
"We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil."
--TS Eliot, The Dry Salvages
Thanks. Always nice when Eliot concurs.
🤎