Poem
Jo Shapcott
I GO INSIDE THE TREE
I GO INSIDE THE TREE
I GO INSIDE THE TREE
Indoors for this ashis through the bark:
notice its colour – asphalt
or slate in the rain
then go inside, tasting
weather in the tree rings,
scoffing years of drought and storm,
moving as fast as a woodworm
who finds a kick of speed
for burrowing into the core,
for mouthing pith and sap,
until the o my god at the heart.
© 2009, Jo Shapcott
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Jo Shapcott
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1953)
Jo Shapcott was born in 1953 in London and educated in Dublin and Oxford and at Harvard. She has worked extensively in universities and in arts education, including at the Arts Council and the Southbank Centre. In 1985 she won first prize in the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition with ‘The Surrealists’ Summer Convention Came to Our City’, which was later included in her first collecti...
Poems
Poems of Jo Shapcott
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I GO INSIDE THE TREE
Indoors for this ashis through the bark:
notice its colour – asphalt
or slate in the rain
then go inside, tasting
weather in the tree rings,
scoffing years of drought and storm,
moving as fast as a woodworm
who finds a kick of speed
for burrowing into the core,
for mouthing pith and sap,
until the o my god at the heart.
I GO INSIDE THE TREE
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