Laurinda Lind
Later Forms
This tree sawed in sections
that look like a man but more
says something, knew even
before it stood from seed
that one day, in its several ways,
it would tell this thing today.
I step in to read the scarred bole
as if I could walk through its door
to where, I learn, when things die,
they don’t quit. Someday
I’ll be dead wood too, when
what I thought I was
will ripen to something
else under air I abandoned
and there I’ll live, lost
to the eye, though loud.
Like a ghost in a tree.
About the writer:
Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, Comstock Review, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, Radius, Spillway, and in anthologies Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press) and AFTERMATH: Explorations of Loss and Grief (Radix Media). In 2018, Lind won first place in both the Keats-Shelley Prize for adult poetry and the New York State Fair poetry competition.
Image: Scars on the Land by Thelma Pott. Fine art photograph. No technical information specified. No completion date specified. By permission.
