Returning
home is a grand thing, and when you live on the edge of a little forest, coming
home is magic. A couple of years ago, I spent time in a woodland community
project in Wales Wales
The Forest Floor
A poem by
Mariella Rossi
It’s a place of
healing,
the forest floor.
A place alive
with secrets and knowing.
My learned sense
of reality catches on the brambles and thorns as I pass,
and the tentative
uncertainty of my untrained step
loosens with the
soil on my feet
in the puddles on
the path.
It’s a place of
healing,
the forest floor.
A place intent on
living.
Where each
movement beneath the
towering company
of life informs the next.
A little slower
this time.
A little softer.
More quiet.
And with each
surrendering breath,
another can be
heard.
One more colossal
and unified in its polyrhythmic sway.
The trees and
vines and creatures with their watchful eyes,
and the earth
underfoot,
swell and recede
in a merry yawn.
On my twilight
walk to fetch water
the dark
patiently dilutes all colour,
but allows detail
a stolen moment to define my way.
The texture of
bark on the lean trees around the spring,
the burbling
contortion of their reflection at its yielding mouth,
the lichen-rough
rocks,
smoothed at the
water's edge,
all persist and
scintillate into grey.
The soft pricked
dendrites of moss cushion my knee
as I slip and
fall,
one foot in the
spring!
And my scream and
giggle pierce the listening night,
and there is no
other human being in sight.
So I sit. Wet and
still. In the moss.
For tonight, when
the darkness stretches its veil impenetrably-tight
over the forest I
shall be inside,
to find my place
within it's creeping, writhing breath.
Its a place of
healing,
the forest floor.
Where
living things may grow.
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