Poem du jour

Stabat Mater
by Kit Wright

Consider the young girl, who for homework or recreation
Was drawing a tree that rose in soaring flight from the gardens
Behind the ground-floor flat. And these
Were dark with buildings in the daytime;
Pressed by walls of lichened brick and a grove of ash and plane.

But this was an evening of lemon September sunlight.
Her mother was taking the washing down from the line.
And the girl from her bedroom window, a sketchpad on her knees,
Looked and looked at the ash tree, saw

It move. It shouldn't have done that.
For this was no shivering of the leaves, or a branch dipping, it stepped
Forward on its own authority,
Made the decision. She screamed.

Her mother, with a clothes-peg in her mouth,
Looked up and saw the great tree like an animal
Considering her and manoeuvering. She hurled
Her body that dragged in dreamtime over the lawn,
Made the back door as it came down like the sky.
It had seemed to rise a shade and swivel,
Then crack like thunder in two along
Three garden walls of shattered masonry
And rubble. From its grave,
Lain where the woman had been standing,
Only the seething of the leaves.

Disbelieving in retribution or providence,
We recoup the moral: proof
That God has a sense of theatre? Salvation through Art?
But the woman and the child,
Crying and shaking in each other's arms,
Come back to me, and what broke cover there
Still feels like the wind of an energy not then blind.