← The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
1573: Dialogue with the Oldest Tree in the U.S., whose Location is a Closely-Guarded Forest Service Secret by Nina Sudhakar
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Foreign. I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the Slowdown. I like to think that I'm still growing as a person, that every year I become older. I truly grow older, developing some new part of myself. Conversations about aging so often dwell on preserving what you have when you're young, about postponing loss. But when I turn to my writing, my poems and prose, I see a body of work that does continue to grow, a body that comes from my physical body, from how my whole being senses and processes the world around me. It continues to grow even when marked by hardship, by absences, and by loss. This reminds me that not all living things grow in the same way. Trees grow their newest matter on the outermost layer, just underneath the bark. Year after year, their rings tell us how old they are. Scientists who study dendrochronology, or the growth of tree rings can tell if a tree has lived through everything from a flood, insect attack, lightning strike, or earthquake just by looking at its rings. Experts in dendroclimatology can even reconstruct past climates and environmental conditions. By analyzing tree rings through science, we have the ability to learn not just about the tree itself, but about the environment it lived in, about the things it experienced and survived over the course of its life. We can only discover them once a tree is felled, but every single tree carries this information. This way, for us to recreate the narrative of the environment it grew in. The histories that trees hold and the secrets revealed by their rings are at the heart of today's poem, Dialogue with the oldest tree in the US Whose location is a closely guarded Forest Service secret. By Nina Sudhakar Stilted woodlands, towering reliquaries give me more than a whisper pass down from the heavens I wish to hear it arise from the greened inlet of your mouth. And every worshiper gathered incredulous amongst the woven roots wreathed in shattered sunlight, imagines the tendrils caressing an open palm, applying a faint pressure reminiscent of an arriving epiphany, a misplayed chord in a masterpiece, a droplet signaling rain, an end to drought, the beginning of a flood, and no way to tell the difference. The swallows prattle on at dusk, shattering the silence with a story told a thousand times. Only I know its origin, the names that were changed. I am still alive and atoning for a sin I never witnessed and sure this world will soften you up the ridges redolent of so many hard edges, a mountain range forged from continents that could not help but touch. And yes, you might long for sleep to be dispossessed of your body to forget that every building erects a foundation for future rubble. If you run the chaff of my living through somnolence's sieve and stand in the remains a patch of safe moonlight, for even the stars throw down beams that have been seen somewhere in the universe. Your every future will always be just glimpsed yet denied by concentric circles mapping a slow route to the present, where still here I stand. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter. Find us on Instagram lodownshow and bluesky.downdownshow.org SA.