Poetry | Birthdays | Mary Ann Schaefer

Birthdays listen
Would that we were born of Trees,
that winds or fires or the excretion
of birds might have strewn 
the ripe seeds of perennial being
like stars tossed across
a tidal sky to drift along
in waves of gravitation
and chance.  
		Would that
the earth waited patiently
for each insignificant
one to alight in between
rock or clay or loam, and
then continue the dark 
descent into dreams
of sunlight and rain,
embryonic roots
and shoots stretching
down and up and away,
sucking on the gasp
of one day opening into
a breathing, waiting
world.  
		Maybe
that was the day
to remember, the day
any one of us began, the day
storms ripped the canopy
open as ancestors fell 
into each other’s arms
and then to the earth, leaving
room now to extend a singular
meristem as the first-order axis, 
a trunk that reiterates a branching
architecture each spring until 
its spreading fingers move 
deliberately, pointing, grasping, 
caressing blue, whispering 
in sign language.  
		Or maybe
beginnings slip by unobserved,
that one day when so much reaching
found rhythm in time, the day
200,000 foliated fledglings un-
folded their highest generative
potential, yes, maybe that very
same day another distinct
reflection appeared
magically in the lake.

Would that we might know 
ourselves just so unknowingly,
so namelessly, so effortlessly
whole in the interchange of many
bodies both providing and being
shelter and sustenance and endurance,
our stories told in bark carvings and 
among the rings growing
inside year upon year across
centuries now, a timeline
measuring the conditions
we celebrate today
standing altogether
living like Trees.