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.
“It’s undeniable that our shared world is burning. The islands of the Caribbean, dangerously and disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis, have seen our forests disintegrate before us, threatening our ecosystems. We have always needed trees, and trees have always held our stories for us, even before we could assign them human nomenclature. Perversely or not, I find it deeply comforting to think about all the green world that will survive us—thrive, perhaps, when we are gone. This is how I hope to live with trees after my death; and how, decolonially, our Caribbean forests are ours to love.”
—Shivanee Ramlochan
Shivanee Ramlochan
