Laurie Klein
Dear Acorn
Hyphae, Toadstool
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
An amateur tree junkie, lifelong, I savored a childhood spent outdoors. Our yard bristled with elm and spruce, cedar and various maples, hickory, willow, and Russian olive, apple and cherry. I daydreamed or read in the shade cast over our lawn, turning the pages of mysteries.
I never suspected the deeper enigmas enacted, in silence, beneath me.
During those years, fabled arboreal ghosts haunted my imagination, from Eden to Calvary to Paradise, along with the lone gingko near church, rustling its ten thousand golden fans.
But I loved the willow best, mourned when lightning destroyed my hideout. During my college years, the stump staged a comeback. By the time I’d married, it had rocketed skyward, a leafy titan.
To this day a smattering of Latin—genus and species—resides in my head from my husband’s stint in forestry school. Ecologist authors Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben have further fueled my admiration, unveiling the secret, resilient, underground world at work beneath the woods, where roots partner elaborate networks of fungi. Day by day, year after year, their interaction mirrors for me the timeless wisdom of the One who conceived them, a sacred cooperation. This reminds me of growing a poem: moment by moment, line after line intertwined, into a shelter: room enough to see, to breathe.
Watch Simard’s TED talk here: https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other?language=en#t-5116. Or peruse Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discoveries-Secret/dp/1771642483/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+hidden+life+of+trees&qid=1628039872&s=books&sr=1-1
Better yet, settle beneath your favorite tree and immerse in Plant-Human Quarterly.
LAURIE KLEIN is the author of Where the Sky Opens and Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, New Letters, San Pedro River Review, SWIMM, Blue Mountain Review, and other journals and anthologies. A recent finalist in the Terrain poetry contest, she lives in the Pacific Northwest.