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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Poem-a-Day is the original and only daily digital poetry series featuring over 250 new, previously unpublished poems by today’s talented poets each year.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
The Dream of a Common Language Leigh Stein 07/07/2014
A lane of Yellow led the eye (1650) Emily Dickinson 07/06/2014
The House-top Herman Melville 07/05/2014
After Mandelshtam Reginald Gibbons 07/03/2014
From “Thoreau” Cole Swensen 07/02/2014
Troubadour Mark Yakich 07/01/2014
Station 40, Chiriu: the Poet Ariwara no Narihira at Eight Bridges Debora Greger 06/30/2014
To Shakespeare Frances Anne Kemble 06/28/2014
The Prairie Town Helen Santmyer 06/28/2014
The Snow Leopard Mother Jennifer K. Sweeney 06/27/2014

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