Reading Poetry to a Yew Tree
Image by Callum James.
Poem to Read to a Yew Tree
Let me dive into the brackish pool
of your dark and dusty green.
Let me perch uncomfortable on the
ropes of your twisted capstan.
Let me mutter to you of current
affairs, whilst you plummet.
Let me sit quietly in the festival
of your red lights.
Let me curl the power of a pip,
a seed of fist and fear.
Let the tumour shrivel in your
many poisoned generations.
Let me take the silent crown
and wear it for a while.
Image by Callum James.
Reading Poetry to Trees
Sitting at the base of a Yew tree, feeling the thick ropes of root cup my hips and the softness of needles beneath me, I began to read:
“So the Spear-Danes in days gone by
And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.”
It was mid-morning on a beautiful June day in the first year of the pandemic. The tree was the largest and oldest of nearly 300 siblings in a grove on the South Downs. The sun was dappled through vast, reaching limbs and as the story of Beowulf unfolded, and the rhythms of Seamus Heaney’s translation drummed through my voice and into my consciousness, so the sun, slowly and inexorably moved the shadows and light-puddles around me where I sat. It takes a long time to read Beowulf, especially when one pauses occasionally to eat, drink tea, and spend a while in meditation.
I am sure that I am among friends here, but I am aware that admitting to reading poetry to trees is likely to prompt ridicule from many.
Yew trees are some of the oldest living creatures on the planet. In Britain, we have some of the only remaining Yew forests in Europe. They are notoriously difficult to date because they are often not susceptible to ring-counting like other trees. Nonetheless, it is widely believed that the oldest Yew trees in Britain can be aged in thousands rather than hundreds of years.
Perhaps more than many other trees, meeting a Yew tree is a genuine encounter with another person. As an animist, the consciousness of trees is a given, but there is still a question about what that consciousness is like and how to interact with it. On the one hand, facile anthropomorphising is insulting and pointless, on the other hand, we only have our own human experience of consciousness with which to interact and to understand.
Which is where poetry comes in. It is our language of the imaginal. If my consciousness and that of the Yew tree are to meet anywhere, it will be in the imaginal. It is there that we both have a footing. And Beowulf seemed appropriate. It too, as a poem, has a long life. It might even be said to have a personhood of its own. Written in the 7th or 8th century, it was older even than the Yew tree, but perhaps not significantly. Reading to the tree (not out of the blue, by the way, this is a tree I have known a long time and one that welcomes such company) is a statement of intent. Symbol and rhythm and narrative are all ways of entering the imaginal.
By the time I had finished reading, it was well into the afternoon. The sun was scorching the ground beyond the cool shadows of the tree. Throughout the day, I could feel the tree’s awareness turning towards me. Slowness is the first teaching that Yew trees have for us. Which leads to the second – perspective. Thirdly, there is a profound and deep silence – a particularly Yew-ish teaching, if I may say.
I would like to say that I had read myself into a trance, but in fact I dozed, lightly, against the massive, animal-like trunk and I saw the deep inside the Yew: a blackness that contains stars. I encountered a voice slower than clouds on a windless day, and eventually a twisting sphere of dark red-black that spiralled towards me and laid a crown of yew leaves with berries on my head before I slept properly. Safe. Unconcerned.
I learned things that afternoon that I can’t describe here, but we must be clear that the learning is not all one way. Our interactions with spirits in nature help them interpret the world in which they live, too. In a world of ecological collapse, what hope does a Yew tree, or any other, have of understanding what is going on without our showing them. Reading poetry to trees is a powerful way of allowing their consciousness and our own to touch in a place beyond the words themselves.
Callum James
Callum grew up on an Island and still lives by the sea. He is most at home in the landscape of the South Downs. He is a rare bookdealer with a speciality in queer literature, a poet, an animist and a magician. His poetry is a part of his magical praxis and often addresses concerns of trauma, landscape and memory. He has a devotional life which centres on Hermes and Hekate. He has a website at www.mercurysbrother.com