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The only daily poetry series publishing new work by today’s poets.

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Poem-a-day

The Meaning of Trees

Split the trunk of an ancient one.  
Count the rings like hidden weddings brought to light.  
Know I’ve been wanting to come to die here,  
for the longest while. My brown limbs as roots.

White men I’ve longed for have walked face-first  
into the rainforest and misunderstood it so 
beautifully. Sonnets to the otherness they find dripping  
from the stems of their long fingers.

After I fuck them, will you eat them raw? 

Trees, I want to die and die in you. No other arms. 
No other branches coroneting the sky.  
No other aviaries for corbeau and kiskadee. Kiss me. 

Before I was awaiting death in the life I hold now,  
plump and feral as a grass-fed lamb, I was 

Yours. I planned how I would construct my funerary bower  
in your arms, gird myself all over 
with liana, a blanket of sphagnum moss plucked from  
your bedroom floor. My eyelids green.

Copyright © 2025 by Shivanee Ramlochan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 18, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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Shivanee Ramlochan

Shivanee Ramlochan
Photo credit: Elechi Todd
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About Poem-a-Day

Poem-a-Day is the original and only daily digital poetry series featuring over 250 new, previously unpublished poems by today’s talented poets each year. Randall Mann is the Guest Editor of August. Read or listen to a Q&A with Mann about his curatorial process, and learn more about the 2025 Guest Editors. Support Poem-a-Day.  

If you have any questions about Poem-a-Day, visit our Poem-a-Day FAQ.

Previous Poems

Title Author Date
From “There where it’s so bright in me” Tanella Boni 09/01/2022
Our Quarantine Story Michelle Whittaker 08/31/2022
Oh, I’m Dying, I’m Dying, Janine Joseph 08/30/2022
2020 Catherine Barnett 08/29/2022
Saying of Il Haboul Adelaide Crapsey 08/28/2022
Disputed Tread Hazel Hall 08/27/2022
​​Pole| |Sport Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon 08/26/2022
​​Curious and Counting Arisa White 08/25/2022
The Inflammation Nikky Finney 08/24/2022
I Was Told the Sunlight Was a Cure Hanif Abdurraqib 08/23/2022

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