When I wake up before her,
I walk to her bedside and
listen, if she lets me.

I duck past trees covering forest’s mouth,
treading carefully so as not to wake her up.

I walk on her soft belly of
mud and leaves, and
sink for a moment
while Earth decides
what to do with me.

I feel mud breathing
beneath my feet, and
wonder what she is thinking.
I brush branches past my face,
unearthing Spring like a child
tugging on her mother’s sleeve –

I am here, even if she doesn’t listen. The canopy is a veil drawn over my head. It
chirps and mutters about something I could never understand, and I listen.
 

A squirrel stands and
stares for a moment
of held breath –

if I could scutter through wood and be part of this forest
instead of breathing through these lungs, I would. I say this to
the squirrel in a moment’s glance, and it replies by blinking.
Closing a glint of sunlight in beady nighteyes.

I’m not sure we understand one another,
and I apologise to the leaves for this –
for my clumsiness, for the time I crushed a
snail shell under my
boot.

I am just too big, balancing on fault lines of this
forest skin. When I run through leaf pyres and
dry dirt, my lungs taste like blood,
and I give her sounds of
heart swimming and
lungs drinking sycamore air,
becoming the mouth of a river –

a graceless sacrifice, but she accepts:
my body for her breath,

my inhale for her exhale.

I breathe more fully than ever: breathe out clouds and cobwebs and
and bug bites and stolen teeth and dirt and half-healed knees, and
when she hands them back,
they taste like willowbark.

There are invisible exchanges such as this
all the time, Child.

The canopy sighs, heavy with bird claws, but
impossibly green, soft around the edges.

Together we make
the most ancient
blood pact girls
ever form:

between their bodies and
their mother, Earth.