Due to the present climate crisis boosting pathogenes and causing hydraulic failure, we see trees dying across the globe at a scale not witnessed in living memory. This sad sight prompts us to reflect on the cultural dimension of the death of trees but also encourages us to re-evaluate the life of plants. The focus here is on poems, essays, novels and plays that celebrate the life of plants.
Photo by NPR – Courtesy of Maria Saponari
https://www.inverse.com/science/trees-dying-shocking-rates-understanding-save-them
Recommended reading:
https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9780063073852
Mahmoud Darwish “The Cypress Broke” (2007)
The Cypress Broke
Translated By Fady Joudah
The cypress is the tree’s grief and not
the tree, and it has no shadow because it is
the tree’s shadow
—Bassam Hajjar
The cypress broke like a minaret, and slept on
the road upon its chapped shadow, dark, green,
as it has always been. No one got hurt. The vehicles
sped over its branches. The dust blew
into the windshields … / The cypress broke, but
the pigeon in a neighboring house didn’t change
its public nest. And two migrant birds hovered above
the hem of the place, and exchanged some symbols.
And a woman said to her neighbor: Say, did you see a storm?
She said: No, and no bulldozer either … / And the cypress
broke. And those passing by the wreckage said:
Maybe it got bored with being neglected, or it grew old
with the days, it is long like a giraffe, and little
in meaning like a dust broom, and couldn’t shade two lovers.
And a boy said: I used to draw it perfectly,
its figure was easy to draw. And a girl said: The sky today
is incomplete because the cypress broke.
And a young man said: But the sky today is complete
because the cypress broke. And I said
to myself: Neither mystery nor clarity,
the cypress broke, and that is all
there is to it: the cypress broke!
Source: The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)
Copyright Credit: Mahmoud Darwish, “The Cypress Broke” from The Butterfly’s Burden. Copyright © 2008 by Mahmoud Darwish, English translation by Fady Joudah.