a tree of infinite roots

19. carrying 4.26.25

some days i believe
i have become a living ossuary -
my body full of bones, of other bodies;

but where does one keep themself,
when holding so much
already here.

20. time is relentless 4.26.25

every year i think there'll be more time to write poetry,
but every year i write a little less,
(and live a little more)

it's been five years
since i spent an entire month alone in quarantine
(and never again, will i be so lonely
or will there be so much poetry)

if i have to trade time un-spoken,
for time un-written
i will take my voice
and throw out the pen
(though don't think
i don't sometimes miss
when everything was poetry
when the flowers sang,
and the birds lived,
and even the locusts danced)

and though i love now,
some days i long for the time
when i was a poet.

21. someone long ago - 4.26.25

i'm still trying to decipher the handwriting that was left on my own bones, carved there sometime before i was born, inherited from bards of another age. sometimes those grooves make me feel hollow like a bird of flight, and i grow feathers as i dream, and migrate home where i will find where this began, but when i wake, the words are there and i'm searching for an achingly familiar voice that i've never heard before.

22. be free

23. The end | or the other beginning

The end looks suspiciously
like the beginning in a tree,
Roots and Branches;
symmetrical hearts of the same trunk.

24. in the beginning

In Eden's hush, where time first breathed,
A divine hand, patted soil and seed,
The Primal Tree, by God's own design,
Its future whispered, in bark and in line.

A perfect echo, from soil to crown,
Where innocence rooted, and grace settled down.
Its unseen depths, a mirror to light,
Reflecting the dawn, conquering night.

25. one tree 5.5.25

trees begin and end
in the same way
branches and roots
symmetrical hearts
of one trunk
stretched across time

and so it is with these
outstretched generations
of people i will never meet
but know as deeply
as the twisting branches
of my veins

the past is a mirror
to all of our future
but we hold each other
in peculiar embrace
two sides of one whole.

26. heritage 5.5.25

my great grandfather once tried
to kill a man with an axe, but rage
made him miss his mark, and so
two men were saved with a jagged scar -
he was charged 18 dollars in court;
walked free. if he would have killed the man,
my father's father would have never been,
nor my father, nor me, and so in this winding way
that day, i suppose, these twisted branches
were almost pruned. and i wonder sometimes
which scars are harder for a family to carry
the ones who survived with jagged wounds
or the ones born of rage.

27. to love the world so freely 5.5.25

As a little girl I decided to start a feather collection, of every stray feather I could find, blue jays, cardinals, goldfinches, sparrows, sparrows, and more sparrows. a trip to the zoo prompted a few sparse flamingo feathers and a stolen peacock feathers my dad got by reaching his hand through the bars of a fence. but my feather collection was all-inclusive and utterly un-selective; the artificially painted pink boa glued down to the same page as the great horned owl's crown and the fuzzy few plucked out of my mother's pillows placed lovingly by the strong hawk tail feathers, all labeled in child-scrawl letters imagining a museum might just ask where and when and why I retrieved this lovely brown or shadowed black one, and I would be ready to tell them the story. I don't exactly know when I stopped collecting feathers in such a way. I suppose it is part of growing up that we learn to leave so many ordinary things, and decide to define treasures by some stricter standard, but sometimes I still have the urge to pick up a bent sparrow feather for my collection, or carry a rough field stone for a mile or two in my jacket pocket, or keep the photo of the empty field, or love the world for a few minutes without any particular reason why.

Ah, thank you Wolfi! I'm going to try to finish a few last threads and get to 30 before the end of May! Thank you for reading throughout! I so enjoyed your thread too - always love ancestry related poetry, because there's so much infinite depth of story and meaning there.

28. Garden Reflection half a month later 5.16.25

Gardens are so lovely. It's like the tangible evidence of the care you put into the ground giving life to beauty or fruit, it is very rewarding - it's like a parable for the way we tend to the world (and to ourselves, and to each other), though typically we aren't able to see the fruit so certainly or so quickly. There's also the daily discipline of being steadfast, which in turn makes you recognize what is steadfast around you... each day I water the flowers, and they in turn grow, each day the sun rises, and the wind dances, and the trees raise their branches in prayer - though everything changes by the minute, there's a rhythm and a strong thread of continuity that does not waver. And then, I always feel nostalgic gardening too - my mother, sister, and I had a community garden plot for a few years where we would go nearly every day in the summer, the three of us, to weed, and water, and harvest, and talk and laugh, I can remember my sister dumping great big watering cans over my head, and then running to avoid the same being done to her, and throwing rotten tomatoes over the fence into the road, and taking bites out of the mystery peppers to see if they'd burn our tongues and then running to the hose-spigot to cool our mouths... eventually one summer my mom tore our entire backyard out... all of the grass, so that she could have a giant beautiful chaotic garden. And so I imagine, the little tomato plant I tend at my own house, reaches its roots across the soil of one thousand miles and wraps its roots around the tomatoes growing in her garden, memory and love stretched out like a quilt, folds close together again, and things don't seem so impossibly far.

29. mulberry tree | mulberry dreams
when you begin a thread intended to be infinite, how could it be contained to one month anyways june '25

Yesterday I was looking nostalgically at the mulberry tree in my local park ~ because it reminds me of the one from back home ~ that my sister and I used to harvest berries from to make berry-ink for our summer harvest celebration as children ~ adorned with dandelion crowns, we'd let the berries dye our fingers purple, and declare to our mother, "the harvest is ready!" ~ I was almost nostalgic enough to rip a handful of un-ripened mulberries out of the branch to munch on, but instead I thought rather more rationally, I will take a picture and send to my sister ~ and just as I was cradling the mulberry in my hand ~ a dragon fly flew into my hair, getting stuck ~ and so whirlwind-quick I pulled her out and threw her back into the sky ~ mulberries and dragon-fly wings and all ~ and she darted into the sun; ~ and maybe that's a sign ~ or maybe she's a messenger ~ a fairy braiding a message into the strands of my hair, to let me know the harvest will be ready soon, if only I can fly home ~

30. another unfinished thread ~ fine [end] 6.21.25

i suppose it's fitting really,
that this thread was never finished,
after-all the tree was meant to be infinite;
and that which is always growing,
can never be stopped,
and can never be truly complete -

for every ancestor i label on my family-tree
there are two more i don't know,
every step i make towards home,
is another reason i'll never really return (whole),
and in the end every word spoken,
bears witness to its echo unheard -

this world is borrowed (full) and (overturning) and (achingly-empty)
like a waterfall pouring into cupped hands
why do we try to hold eternity in finite places
like roots could become veins,
like rivers could become roads,
like love could become spoken -

i suppose for all our burnt finger-tips
we never really give up trying to hold the sun
light is strange like that -
it tricks us into believing
we can keep what we can see -

but maybe that's exactly what makes us human -
the tendency to run towards the endless horizon,
swim against the unending ocean,
grasp at the light,
and (believe) we could find where it ends.