Oak Tree/Poawnncindg*

Standing for centuries,

pale white bark, jagged

Essence of this forest

Roots run deep and wide

Binding sky to soil to rock

to this place

from this place

Moving ground water to sky water

Inhaling this human excess

Up top sits a crow’s nest

Perched high, protected

Twigs wound akimbo

Weaving sticks to stems

Tender soft lining

For the fresh new chicks

A corvid’s future dream

A white oak,

disassembled

into parts woven tight

over time, slow

binding the people

from this place

to this place

Eel baskets to elucidate

A culture through time

Hand-woven identity

Up top sits Crow’s Nest 

Perched high on an old sea bed

Strapped to the mast

Aloft the surrounding waters

Thrust from endemic civilization to colonists,

through a bloody civil war and onward to climate change.

A future landscape’s dream?

*Poawnncindg is the Potawomeck word for Oak Tree as shown in The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia: Expressing the Cosmographie and Comodities of …by William Strachey , Richard Henry Major. Publication date 1849