May 2015

Notes on a Mulberry Tree

      by Hilary Sallick

New swellings     green eruptions     each rise of spongy     tissue

emerging     from inside a brown skin    no longer container   

but pressed back     about a cluster the size of the tip

of my finger     giving so softly to my touch—

this history revealed along each narrow branch:   

the outer-most buds    still hard unopened     

then inches away      the softness     the tiny serrated

edges of leaves—

I’m trying to see it clearly    to understand more

this way of becoming     leaning into the low-hanging branches   

following     the path back to the trunk—

trusting    in the absence of words                                 

in each word’s eventual     unfolding

Hilary Sallick is an adult literacy teacher in Somerville, Massachusetts. She loves looking closely at language, poems, and the natural world—with her class and on her own. Her poems have appeared in the Aurorean, Salamander, The Human Journal, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.