‘I learned: Trespass’

Poem by Dana Littlepage Smith

I learned there was not always this crack guttering through
the meadowlands of days, through our restless minds and bodies.

I learned the welfare state once meant the right
to forage hazelnuts in leaf litter, chanterelle and roots…

Sphagnum moss can heal a wound; I learned
from my mother’s mother’s mother’s mothers

which fallen oak burned longest, which birch spat flame
into fire. I learned which wildwood held its spring

like a sacred word tongued in fern, which fiddlehead
unfurled might finger something green back into me.

If I lay still enough, long enough, I learned my thoughts
might uncloud anxiety’s horizon.

I learned a silent green weaves its way
through the rising and the falling of all things.

Now I learn there is no access to field or ridge
where I can walk from this city space. I learn

no bus will take me to the pines where I might sleep
on the needlework of centuries.

I learn how easily the names are lost from recollection:
the common haircap, the silky forklet and conkers

cannot ferret their way back into our dreams
through cemented meadows. I learn the crucified

can have four legs or two wings and that the suffering of forests,
wetlands, mountains, moors and ours will be forever

woven in the way the wind is woven through the trees; I learn
that if they cannot, then I will not breathe.

I lean that there is no real reckoning as yet for the years
we have been harvesting this great sadness.

I learn that I must walk through upland, moorland
again and again and again and that this is not,

was not and never will be trespass.

The Kinder Trespass of 1932, referenced in the poem, will be remembered in a new mass ‘trespass’ on 24 April. See https://bit.ly/3anisOd for details.

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