Oh, the Humanitree!
Portrait of another workday on the platform...
Across the platform, the trees gaze
at us, blind distant cousins of
bone, nerves and breath.
They gossip among themselves about
which birds are causing a ruckus, which
ones are moving into their nest apartments,
which ones are moving out. While their
branches juggle squirrels who perform
acrobatic feats of defying gravity.
And this morning’s sun beams through
their limbs to give September’s chilly
air a quality I can’t describe, while they
gaze across the platform at their fellow
human trees and the fruit they bear:
--sunglasses
--ball caps
--bluetooth headphones
--coffee mugs in a free limb
--cellphones
--backpacks containing laptops which they’ll whip
out as soon as they board the train in
ten minutes…
Poor things bent forward from
carrying all that weight over the years,
or malnourished in the love department.
While the trees breathe out O2
to keep us alive, to you we return Co2,
an invisible melodic exchange of breaths.
And in those breaths, rolling over your
tree-tongue leaves, I hear a troubling tune
as my fellow humanitrees bend even more,
wondering when
their boughs will
finally break…
Wow. Stunning visuals, gives new meaning, at least to me, of what human baggage means.
Fun little read! Funny that I've also been working with the trees and their relation to us both with my last poem on Substack (Tree-Eyed Sonnet) and one that I just finished up which parodies rock-a-bye baby in the context of war. Good to see I'm not the only poet with their eyes on this!