I am eleven the first time —
shoes scuffing moss,
hands grazing bark rougher
than my father’s unshaved jaw.
The forest swallows noise,
an unfamiliar silence settling,
thicker than any sermon
I had pretended to hear.
Here, no pews — only roots
twisting upward, a cathedral
of branches that refuse
to be still.
But the woods do not heal.
They remind:
I am nothing alone.
Decades later, the trees
stand unchanged,
though the trails are thinner,
the canopy frayed.
Now, I carry my daughter –
her small hand sticky
with sap and biscuit crumbs.
She calls every fern
a magic feather
and believes the soil hums
just for her.
What do I tell her
about the absence of birdsong,
the flattened moss where
a machine once lingered?
How do I explain that
we are caretakers who forgot
to bring water
to our own roots?
She looks at me,
wide-eyed and alive,
waiting for the story I promised,
the one where the forest endures
because we learned,
just in time,
to listen.
—
Dr Sam Illingworth has a PhD in atmospheric physics, a long-standing love of the arts, and a passion for using poetry to make science more democratic. He is a professor of creative pedagogies, and founder of Consilience, the world’s first peer-reviewed science and poetry journal. Find out more about Sam’s work at www.sam.illingworth.com.
