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Quercus magnosquamata acorn
A  little-known species from the northern Zagros forests of Iran

Extract from "Oak" by Katharine Towers

This entry in our series on Oak Poetry is an extract from Oak, a book by British poet Katharine Towers. The book consists of a sequence of poems that accompanies the oak from acorn to grave and into its afterlife. It has been described as a "long poem at once fragmentary and whole, with all the sophistication of folklore and all the play of true poetry." The extract below is from the third section of the book, entitled "The Lover", reproduced by kind permission of the author.

If you would like to propose a poem for inclusion in this series, please click here.

such a thrill
when a bird comes

and a skinny branch
accepts his scant weight

it's only Robin
quite ordinary

all the same
a glory

the oak has reached the age of a lover
meaning one who delights
in a bird on a branch in spring

stupid to think an oak
could be in love
with a bird
but

an oak is not an iceberg
the oak you don't see
is not a dreadful undertow

an oak is two

and each needs the other
as the young man staring into a pond
needs what he sees in the water

and each loves the other
as the young man staring up from a pond
loves what he sees leaning over
 

   I have three loves
Three loves have me

   Without three loves
O what would I be

(and this is the song of the little oak tree)
 

regarding the first true love of an oak which is Light


a tree will always mention the sun
in its manner of growing
for who won't mention too much
the one that they love

like a quirk of the tongue 
which can't help curling
to make the shape of the name of the lover

thus an oak on its own in a field
will form itself into a dome

making of the sun a god
and of its leaves a worshipful company
 

regarding the second true love of an oak which is Air


all day the leaves
gulp gulp
busy with a verb

a breeze rattles through the twigs
and might speak in passing
of the sea or a straight-sided hill

or a river with a swerve in it
this or that elsewhere
which Air carries in its teeth like the past

a tree must catch what it can before dark
when it will giantly exhale
like a whale spouting
 

regarding the third true love of an oak which is Rain


an oak in summer has a serious thirst
put your ear to the trunk
to hear water moving against gravity
up from the great sinker root
like an underground engine
droning and churning

or Rain is quickly passed from leaf to leaf
like a game of whispers

and Rain will dribble down the trunk
along the narrow twisty lanes
to end in dark

and Rain will wash an oak tree clean
and the oak will hang out its leaves to dry
and the leaves will show forth
their perfect tiny geographies

Oak by Katharine Towers
Oak is available on Amazon and Amazon UK

 


Katharine Towers was born in London and now lives in Derbyshire with her family. Her debut poetry collection The Floating Man won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. The Way We Go from this collection appeared as a Poem on the Underground and was also set to music by composer Laura Stevens. Her second collection The Remedies was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Katharine’s poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio and included in several anthologies, as well as in The Guardian, Poetry Review, and Poetry London. From 2016 to 2018 Katharine was Poet in Residence at the Cloud Appreciation Society.