If you can’t speak of it,
stand in the embrace of a Norway spruce,
branching to the ground.
All of Norway will shelter you
in a cloak of boughs filled with fjords of light.

The church of the trees has a place
for what you are carrying.
The brambled chaos of a forest
growing and dying can guide you:
an old beech stump
is becoming a new kingdom
for ferns and voles.

Full-throated magnolias
open for arias in spring,
but in winter, trees show you
their true shape. You belong to something
magnificent beginning in darkness
below the ground.  It branches out
while keeping the center aligned,
stands through the seasons and trusts
small seeds to the wind.

If you can’t find a tree
when you need one, all you need
is one green shoot making its way
through a crack in concrete.
Hardness doesn’t have to win,
you too can rise.

- published in Wild Earth

SHELBY ALLEN is a 2004 prizewinner in the Boston Herald poetry contest judged by Alice Quinn.
Shelby teaches poetry in Massachusetts state prisons and is completing an M.A. in Theater Education at Emerson College.  Her poems appear in Phoebe, New MillenniumWritings, English Journal, and elsewhere.