Mother Tree by Rachel Elion Baird

I need to walk, to shake off the summer fervor, the bustle of crowds, noise, and traffic so I head “up-island” for the slower pace of Aquinnah. The island of Martha’s Vineyard, a 23,000-year-old bi-product of the Laurentide ice sheet, is now made up of terminal moraines and outwash plains punctuated with frost-bottom-created ponds and stream beds. Understanding where this land comes from helps me to recognize where it is going – back into the sea. Evidence of the continuing cliff erosion is visible all around me. As I stand here at the westernmost tip of the Gay Head Moraine, the trees are busy speaking beneath my feet. All this chatter! Just up ahead is a mother oak. I will sit beneath her branches, listen, and rest.

Mother Tree

Above, her canopy of leaves

touch skyward

echo the song of the Uni-verse

in green light streams, 

Ceolta na Cruinne – it is real,

this living library, knowledge,

medicines we need to heal

giving shade and shelter

from the August heat, summer speak,

ground is soft underfoot

mixing edge-of-meadow grasses 

twining roots, fireweed,

a ring of acorns skirt the oak,

over time will sprout

one tree into many trees;

she will feed them all.

© 2023, Rachel Elion Baird