The crooked oak is dead, now blind to the colours of lichen, deaf to the striking wood pecker, doesn’t feel the stir of starlings’ wings twisting and turning before roosting, nor sense the inclination of pines towards her.
After words come into leaf and fallen from her body as whole and rounded poems in storms, then withered and curled as the sap ebbed, now there are only the remains in her roots for young ones to suckle, a network of nourishment, vers libres.
‘Aus so krummen Holz’
© copyright text and translation Mary Burdett-Jones 2023