New Poem: The Dawn Redwood

A long-form poem inspired by Amherst’s Dawn Redwoods and their improbable journey from ancient forests to present-day shade trees. This piece reflects on deep time, community stewardship, and the quiet power of survival, rooted in specific places around Amherst.

I sing the Dawn Redwood,

and I sing Amherst that shelters it,

and the long patience of the earth that forgot,

then remembered.

I sing the tree that learned how to wait.

Once it walked the whole Northern world,

its feet in swamps, its needles brushing mammoth breath,

its cones listening to ice and fire argue over centuries.

Then silence came.

The books closed.

The pages of stone said, extinct.

But the tree did not argue.

It stood quietly in a hidden valley,

mist rising from Hubei soil,

while empires burned and railroads sang,

while clocks were invented and wars named themselves.

I love this about it,

that survival does not always announce itself,

that endurance can look like stillness,

that the future sometimes hides behind a mountain

until the right eyes arrive.

O Dawn Redwood,

you drop your needles each year like a practiced truth,

not clinging, not hoarding,

trusting the seasons to return what they must.

Green to bronze, bronze to bare, bare to promise again.

You stand now in Amherst,

flanking the doorway of prayer and song,

two witnesses at the Goodwin church,

your roots holding stories older than the cornerstone,

your height speaking faster than the town can write you down.

You were planted after memory forgot to list you,

yet you rose anyway,

as all necessary things do.

I see you from Woodside Avenue,

from Tyler Place,

from Belchertown Road where young ones stretch their limbs,

and I feel the town breathing through you,

cooling itself leaf by leaf.

O people of Amherst,

this is how time returns to us,

not as a museum piece behind glass,

but as shade on a sidewalk,

as red bark peeling in the afternoon sun,

as children learning the word fossil

and then learning that fossil does not mean gone.

I say the tree belongs to the future

because it remembers the past without being trapped by it.

I say the tree is a lesson in mercy,

in patience,

in the radical act of continuing.

Sing with me, Dawn Redwood,

you who were lost and found without changing your name,

you who remind us that extinction is not always the final verse,

that the earth keeps drafts,

and sometimes revises.