MARION McCREADY

Sitka Spruce Fallen

How the light filters through the rain-haze,

through the familial grove of Sitka spruce, Scots pine.

The pale trunks are pathways to the sky. Look up, 

tumble into their great heights, into the canopy 

of twisted needles. The root plate of the downed tree, 

wind-ripped from the earth in a great circular disk, 

is a muddied sun. Upended, it has left a pit in the ground, 

lost matrix of tap, lateral and heart roots. 

Lost voice among the forest. Disintegrating piece 

by piece into silence. Storm-felled among the grasses, 

it bridges the burn. The body of the spruce crossing 

a small tributary is the channel to an unseen doorway. 

The smooth trunk, the tree bole, moss-patched 

and recumbent. Its root plate holds mysteries within.

Coins of light splash in the river running under 

the slumped body of the tree. It is the currency 

of memories. They flash for a moment, are witnessed, 

then pass. The Sitka spruce fallen has left absence hanging 

in the air like a fracture in the days after a sudden loss.

Bamboo Windchimes

The windchimes hang in my garden,

wooden chandelier. They flicker all day,
    all night - their conversation with the air 
carries me into dreams, memories...

I want to leave this life 
    surrounded by apple trees,
the birch in a dazzle of afternoon light, 
    and the azalea saved
from my late mother's garden

Burnt yellow of the dying flowers,
the light, the fresh breeze, 
the leaves and bamboo windchimes 
        are my witnesses.

The chimes hang from the outer corner
            of a wood store
above a green plastic watering can.
The wind creates syllables from clattering wood,

an orchestra of collisions.
    And the collisions make songs 
        mysterious as nursery rhymes.

The windchimes harness the breeze 
blown in from the Clyde firth.
Songs, like tidal waves, 
    journeying from the centre 
        of the earth to my garden. 

Songs I have known from another life

and now beckons for my return.

Marion McCready lives in Argyll and has won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and Melita Hume Poetry Prize. She is the author of three books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Look to the Crocus, was published by Shoestring Press in 2023.   https://sorlil.wixsite.com/mmccready

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