Happy Earth Day 🌍 and happy “due date” to my first girl, my springtime baby, born three days late 13 years ago... “The Gestures of Trees” celebrates the emergence of life, a hopeful notion that I need to keep in the forefront of my mind during these challenging times. I took the title of this poem from a line in Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and the title of my new poetry chapbook, Escape of Light, comes from this very poem.
The Gestures of Trees
I imagine it must be Godlike to create
something from nothing. Sound
from silence.

The stealthy escape of light
from the tight black hole of space.
The close wrapped buds on the magnolia tree
outside my newborn daughter’s window wave
and beckon shyly,
resurrected from their snow-
shrouds, the frozen decay that birthed them.
Come out to play, little girl.
Like you, we were only a figment last season.
And now we live.