Tag: tree

The Beech Tree by Heather Hallberg Yanda

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The Beech Tree

For weeks, all the trees on
Lockwood Road prepared
for absence. Now, in late
Autumn, they found it.  I

walk through a sepia
photograph.  Today
I think of my father —
my dad, my daddy — who

is fragile, who stumbles
easily.  For weeks, I
have felt his spirit, his
warmth fall away.  I have

walked this road many times
with him: every turned leaf
meant naming maples, ash,
dogwood. Now every rut

in the road is a new
chance to fall. I can still
hear his footfalls, his laugh.
Here, in the grief

before the grief, all is
vulnerable, a word
from the Latin, meaning
to wound.  Here, where Finley’s

fence opens to this
meadow, a beech tree I
never noticed still grasps
its bright leaves.  It teaches

what my dad taught: to stand
tall, and when it is time
to let everything go,
to let everything go.

*

Heather Hallberg Yanda teaches in the English Department at Alfred University, in the hills of upstate New York. After many years of sending poems out, her work has been published in such journals as Barely South Review, Comstock Review, Tar River Poetry, and (forthcoming) in The Yale Journal of Medical Humanities. In the midst of the pandemic, her first collection of poems, Late Summer’s Origami, was published by Ashland Poetry Press. She is currently seeking a publisher for her second collection, What the Stones Borrowed.

Three Poems by Amy Small-McKinney

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We Are / I Am

How often did I sit beside
an older woman and ignore her?
What kind of tree

produces seeds encased in pealike
pods? I am searching
for its name. Call me if you know.

Call me if you are learning to love yourself,
your body that has lived through
seventy turns, at least.

At the park, the pond’s water appears textured
because of how the wind moves.
Wind, that body we don’t see,

except when it forces us to lose
what we love, a hat or—
We begin and we end.

Somewhere in between—
today—a young woman turned away.
I am her old woman.

Call me if you know
how to trace the blossoms’ origins.
How to look closely

to find the solid seedcoat
that must be broken
before another Redbud tree is born.

*

Paper, Tree, Ascension

On the mountain edge my daughter
talked me down.
My body, a slip of paper.
Why would I want to rise?
I’m afraid of heights.
Nothing but clouds and the sun
coming and going.

Romantics adore sunset.
I don’t like it.
It means opening to the arrogance
of the dark forcing its way through light.
It means remembering my husband
does not remember,
confuses day and night.

I love those mornings
when I am the only one awake,
when silence is my audience,
my consolation. This is my heaven.

If I had to ascend, I would become a tree.
Solid, I would not drift away.
Only my topmost limbs rising.
The slim document of my life would remain.
Beneath me, a woman would rest.

*

Missing Sock

uncovered from inside
my aging body

beneath mounds of carping voices
and a lifetime of a killdeer’s

displays of distraction
intent on staying safe.

I am grateful to have found it—
this softer self—as though another

heart unlocked.
How long have we been lost?

Very nearly forever.

*

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others. She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Two Poems by Hilary King

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Persimmon Tree in Winter

Grand dame in orange diamonds.
Library with a hundred copies
of the same delicious book.
Last guest to leave the wedding
pocketing the leftover favors.
She poses by the pine tree,
Ignores the evergreen.
I hold my fruit late like that,
certain another summer
will reveal my good. It won’t.
I too shine best in ice.

*

How to Haunt Someone You Love

Fill a kitchen cabinet with coffee mugs.
Plain, fancy, handmade, ceramic,
Santa-faced, jacked-up jack o’lantern,
covered in flowers or cats, quotes from books,
Gifted from work, or swiped.
Fill two shelves of the cabinet.
Stack them on top of each other
so they tilt like trees in a storm
or tombstones in a very old cemetery.
Then die without telling anyone
which was your favorite,
which fit your hand just right.
Make us examine each
of your morning vessels for answers.

*

Originally from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, TAB, Salamander, Belletrist, Fourth River, and other publications. Her book Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024. She loves hiking, travel, and ribbon.

Four Poems by Grant Clauser

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Fireline Trail

This trail, marked in yellow blazes
for the mapless and lost, where lookouts
once kept eyes awake for smoke and fire,
begins in white pines, the edges
needlesoft and quiet, then blends
into proud old chestnut oaks standing
straight a hundred feet in a kind
of wisdom. At the top, where paper birch
lean toward the gorge, unwrapping
in the almost noonness of the sun,
a meadow filled with low blueberry
bushes stretches until the mountain
bends to the river. I pick my fill
of ripe ones, miles from highway
traffic and the river now dying
from mine acid. Here, so much free sweetness
within easy reach the world must be
playing a trick. Maybe it’s not
that life is hard. Just our expectations
too high. Eyes bigger than your stomach
my mother used to warn. I’ll leave most
of the berries here for birds. Begin
the switchback down to the car, back
through those oaks, the dark quiet
of pines, the day’s haze that leads
toward home, the taste of blueberries,
the whole marvelous mountain,
still on my lips.

*

Weeping Willow

When you’re eight years old
and pull enough of the whip-like
branches into your hands, take
a running start and lift your legs,
half the tree may bend, but still
you’re flying for a little while,
swinging in the sun’s arc
over the rock your brother calls
the Volkswagen because it’s almost
as big as the neighbors’ blue Beetle,
and when you let go, wild leaping
out over the rock onto soft ground,
rolling down the hill into the always
wet part of the yard, you know that
sting in your hands from landing
will go away, just like everything,
the last two times your parents packed
to move, some new tree waiting
at the new house, your knee bruised
again through your hand-me-down jeans.

*

White Pine

Down in the ravine
where the Black Creek’s
stoneflies compete
with gravity, and the water
competes with boulders,
almost everything
is part shadow, even me
when I crept up on the bear
scratching his rump
on the rough bark
of a pine, the small tree
shaking with every shove
of his legs and spine
til needles sprinkled
down on him and into
the cool brook trout
waters of the creek.
This went on for minutes.
The tree pushing back
against the yearling’s itch,
the creek slipping by
unnoticed, me frozen
in shadow trying to save
every moment in memory,
that place I go to more
often these days,
that place I feel better
in, rubbing shoulders
with the past, making
the minutes last.

*

White Pine II

Who doesn’t stop to marvel
at big trees? This forest, clear cut
completely at least twice shouldn’t
have a pine so massive.
It would take my whole family
to wrap around its trunk
like a bear hug, reward
for standing still
a couple centuries.
Upstream a mile
the remains of a mill
that ground this mountain bare.
Downstream a cemetery
remembers the flood
that washed the valley clean.
If this great old tree
remembers anything
I hope it forgets the sounds
of saws and chains.
The train whistle bearing
coal to Philadelphia.
The one great fire
that finished finally
the town. I hope
for wind and sun. Some
redstarts nesting
100 feet in boughs
still growing, getting
farther and farther
from the ground.

*

Grant Clauser is the author of five books including Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven (winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Award) and Reckless Constellations (winner of the Cider Press Poetry Award). Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Rattle, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry and others. He works as an editor and teaches at Rosemont College.

Treescape by Amy Barone

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Treescape

A peephole to the world outside
reveals shades of green,
brilliant budding leaves.

The collage of trees shines
on a pink Japanese maple
as big crows probe a patch of dirt.

Mockingbirds aren’t chirping;
they’re belting out arias—so much to say
after their winter isolation.

I invited the morning shower
to wash away the cold,
help a heartier spring take root.

Rain made it easier to stay inside
and while away another Sunday.

*

Amy Barone’s latest poetry collection, We Became Summer, from New York Quarterly Books, was released in 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing.) Barone belongs to the Poetry Society of America and the brevitas online poetry community. She lives in NYC.

Persimmon Tree by Doeun (Jessica) Kim

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Persimmon Tree

A grandmother sits on a layer of newspaper
beside piles of flattened cardboard boxes.
The cold coats the palm of her hands
like a thin glove, slowly numbing the crevices of her fingers.
Dry flakes of skin dress her wrinkled knuckles
as she remembers her grandson
who would crouch beneath a persimmon tree.
The bright orange hue of the fruit glowed
amongst the frail branches.
She taught him how to trace the bruises
and pick out the ones with the smoothest skin.
She’d wipe off shreds of soft persimmon flesh
that lingered on the corner of his mouth.
This story of bliss splinters
when the feeling of warmth curl around her body
is forgotten and the cadence of her breath weakens.
She wishes memories were like books,
remaining on shelves for one to open,
over and over again.

*

Doeun (Jessica) Kim is a South Korean currently studying in the Philippines. Her work has been recognised by Austin Poets International, Cathartic Youth and Isacoustic among others. During her free time, she enjoys doing contemporary dance.