another begins to grow and spread

Water rumbles down the mountainside, gurgles in ditches and drainpipes, pours along the guttering that protrudes from the roof of our villa over the balconies and out across the garden, washing away in the sun an enormous icicle that hangs down the height of a half story and drips like a stalactite onto a second, planted below a tree, a freakish stalagmite overgrown with black branches. That tree is forever destined to bear its crystalline mistletoe – scarcely does one bunch melt in the sun, when another begins to grow and spread.

(Zofia Nałkowska, Choucas, 1927, tr. Ursula Phillips)



It is said that in times gone by
They formed forests and that birds
Also called dragonflies
Small creatures like singing hens
Looked down from them.

(Sarah Kirsch, Trees, from Ice Roses: Selected Poems, tr. Anne Stokes)