I kneel by the redwood cutting basal roots,
taunt slivers that shoot up from the base,
and think how this tree is always reproducing.
And if I’d birthed that child, the last, or the one before,
they’d be grown now, cast off from the shore
of my mothering. There’s an odd comfort
in knowing my children would have left me eventually.
No matter. What I’ve held these many years
in my body, is a half-used organ—
a heart that dispenses just enough blood to survive.
This tree lived before the fox and the butterfly,
before Eve and the empire of building,
each tendril greenlit with the fires of spring.
They say the redwood quivers with embryonic tissue,
will keep making more of itself—
masterful and entirely reckless.
The Tree by Paola Bruni | Sandalwood Poetry Reed Diffuser
Paola Bruni is originally from San Francisco and now lives in Aptos, California by the sea. She began writing poetry in 2016 after a long marketing career. Paola is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has been published in prestigious literary journals such as Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Rattle, among others. She is the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize and the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest judged by Ellen Bass. Her first book of poetry is an epistolary collection titled how do you spell the sound of crickets (Paper Angel Press, 2022).
