- Eithne Lannon
The Giving
Walk through woodlands,
dried pine droppings and moss giving
beneath your feet. Tree roots,
their underground thoughts rising
in you, toes dipping into the fern-pool
of a swamp earth; peat, anthracite,
the mulch of other lives. Wherever you touch bark,
you overflow, rough ridges and the soft branch
tissue of lichens. You reach into earth shadows,
slide darkness through your fingers; the woods
come closer, lift you out of your feet
into blotted leaf rhythms and beech sounds;
you, a light chestnut splash on the earth, a space
for eavesdropping, nothing but the moment
to go by. Time gathers in hollow trees,
you hatch into memory, move through it like a moonslide
through water. Beneath the spine of a broad leafed fern,
you slip into the root of knowledge,
follow the damp soil-song; stem-shape, leaf-form, tuber-curl;
over the edge into the continuance of all,
beyond every separate and singular thing.