I want to be a tree

 

I Want To Be a Tree         by Sumana Roy

 

I want to be a tree. 

 

I know that this desire lives outside the curriculum. 

Irrationality is man’s favourite home – 

One man’s love is another’s superstition. 

I am the tree that wears passion’s baggy clothes.

My hair soaks fear, my leaves the planet’s poison air.

There is memory, always half-eaten,

and there’s sleep, inevitably rural.

There’s also sunlight, always a neighbour.

It’s summer. And so the road’s deathless fever. 

 

I want to be a tree, 

as naturally branched as the body’s posture in sleep.

To woo birds – they avoid men and motion to sit on trees. 

 

I’m leaning against a statue of sunlight.

The wind affects us unequally. 

I wonder why tree branches 

do not behave like curtains in the wind. 

Or why we fail to hear creepers knocking at the door. 

 

I want to be a tree. 

The wind escaped being written.

The fire’s autograph, the shrivelled sunlight on trees.

Seasons arrive like prompters in a play. 

The trees perform without the need to pluck claps. 

I am an extra filling out the frame. 

Change, cycles, the spiky heads of moss, 

the menstrual stillness and the piracy of affection.

 

I want to be a tree.

Air a doll between my leaves,

prayer as inconsequential as mimicry.

Only blood needs religion.

And so there is none among plants. 

Only love, as accommodative as a paragraph. 

 

Love needn’t be reciprocal – 

How else can we love the dead?

The earth loses ownership of dead trees. 

I imagine my funeral sometimes.

You, for whom the guitar is an integer of sadness,

you who thought I was invincible like crushed paper, saying,

“My world has lost its chlorophyll”.

 

We are very pleased and honoured that Sumana Roy, the author of "How I became a tree" will participate in this MAPPING PARADISE project.

Hope to see you, tomorrow in 

KUNSTVERENIGING DIEPENHEIM in our first presentation our works about the trees and the paradise in Twenthe.....

Yours
Susanne von Bülow
in taNDem 

with Emmy Bergsma / for MAPPING PARADISE