10 Poems about Trees

A tree is a poem, a gift, an offering from the earth. When I come across a sapling that's fresh out of the seed I light up because it's a gift and in pristine condition. Oak tree saplings give me a particular buzz because I grew up with big oaks and to see a tiny specimen reaching for the sun and air is to see a giant in a few hundred years time, awesome yet humble.

A tree takes everything thrown at it and comes back for more. Their ability to withstand the foulest storms, weeks of baking sun and the odd deluge or two is inspiring.

To top it all they allow birds to build nests in their branches and twigs, up where the light filters through packed leaves or in a fork angled to hold the messiest of nests.

Without the vast forests breathing out oxygen there would be no beautiful planet.The Tree of Life is a true symbol! These poems are created from and dedicated to all sorts of trees.

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,

All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,

Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,

Walt Whitman

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With A Beech

You can feel its generosity,

contentment and relief

as the wind comes questioning

all its ever been.

You know why it stretches

striving for the light

biding its time now like a giant

rewarded with a secret.

You decide to push against

the skin on which lovers might

declare their names. What

are you hoping for today?

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Tree

There was mist thick enough

to get lost in, dry stone wall

swallowed up in grey.

The breeze revealed the tree

that turned the field green

then veiled it again

as though we’d never seen.

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Old Oak at Apley Head

Scars, scratch marks on rough bark, a thick limb

lost, grounded like a ruin. I walk around its fat bole

over bulging roots that clench field sides, the invisible

life feeding all quercus sees: power lines, spires, cloud,

a watery flow of traffic glinting like small fish.

The quiet girth of a king, shadowy textured skin,

the past on show, the future hidden inside yet here

now, devoid of trivia, season after season a love

of the profound comes up out of ordinary ground.

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Gothic Alder

This silhouette, gestures

tapering away to part angry cloud

is a totem of twilight.

The broken toothed

fat man walks his muzzled dog, a Hitchcock extra

when bats appear, and spits untruths into the night.

Magpies have done the blackbird in

and clacker the news from shady sycamore

that they'll do it again.

The beck rushes on, a dark panic of blood,

its nutrient garbage a gurgling throat constructed

and constant under an ancient stone bridge, collapsing

into machine dredged sand.

Run the gauntlet of shadows in

the haunt of drunks

and the lord of Kettlethorpe Hall, feeding phantom hounds.

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Birch Under Grey Cloud

On a red brick wall bonsai fashion, roots

feeling through to the other side

where a yard collects junk, dozing dogs and shadows

already here from tomorrow’s sun.

A satellite of ray and rain, its transmitted story of green

listened to by damp doves come down from dripping pine

to walk the city wall. What shall we do? Inform

this little tree, unreal as the man singing arias upstairs

that forests may fall and we never hear?

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Near Seckar Woods

These trees want to draw me in.

Their dreamed up routes might stretch

forever onto a plateau

of gorse, broom and woody heather,

the varying lives we sometimes crave.

It’s the wood end succulence, the suntrap's

skin that holds hierarchies, archangels,

burdock, campion and a troupe of dancing gnats

in and out of light like flaming bits of love.

Height of summer and birds are learning

by the hour what works to perfection

we reach when we die.

They caught God’s particle today the day

each thing had its happening just before and

after I knew me, him and the answering trees.

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Two Highland Trees

In a snowmelt dawn

only water and rock

and two following.

I am there now

or was, in a glen

of our making

crossed by ravens

who spoke gaelic.

It’s romantic

far from Achintree,

or was,

even now thinking

of the crazy Scot,

weeping from wood smoke.

You want the two trees

in a song, or dancing

arms held high

music flowing

like a stream, even now.

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Why can't we decide?

One young tree has flame enough

to light a mountain!

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Catalonian Mountain With Trees

That blue

the vultures spiral

is a life of the voice

and orangey rock

holds you

clueless

on a slope of whispers.

Scented pine

you enter, emerging

with a dozen words

echoing solitude

a figure

someone views

and calls

as the weight

of the mountain frees you up.

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Distant Wood

Over in the cool deep green leaves breathing

the mad world’s air. The pig farm floats in mist

and rain has made a river of the day. Swallows

preen inside like neglected tourists.

Ask yourself why you don’t walk out

of this compound you’ve built to sit on roots

a big beech extends into sand and stone,

trapped in freedoms of light and mind.

And later crows folding the fields under black wings

will roost in relieved trees. Repeated bliss.

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