Sleeping in the heart of the primal forest,
her fallen length is half-submerged in
a swamp dark as tea, a rich, elemental soup,
a fluid of decay. Along her plinth, decorating
her generous length, develop clusters of
emerald velvet mosses and gray-green lichens.
There she, the nurse log, welcomes new
seeds as they float along the air and arrive
to take root. And there, feeding on the dark
richness of her rot, rises a row of new
young saplings, miniature redwoods,
burgeoning up into a new forest.
–
Luci Shaw is author of over forty books of poetry and creative non-fiction, and her writing has appeared in numerous literary and religious journals. In 2013 she received the Denise Levertov award for creative writing from Seattle Pacific University. Her most recent poetry collections, An Incremental Life (2025) and Reversing Entropy (2024), were published by Paraclete Press.