“One day walking in Argyll with my husband we encountered a wishing tree which surprised us a great deal because I didn’t know there were any in Scotland. I mean a tree people have bashed coins into for a wish or desire—I knew they existed in Ireland but had never seen one in Scotland.”
The Wishing Tree
by Kathleen Jamie
I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland
but in the fold
of a green hill
the tilt from one parish
into another.
To look at me
through a smirr of rain
is to taste the iron
in your own blood
because I hoard
the common currency
of longing: each wish
each secret visitation.
My limbs lift, scabbed
with greenish coins
I draw into my slow wood
fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania*.
Behind me, the land
reaches toward the Atlantic.
And though I’m poisoned
choking on the small change
of human hope,
daily beaten into me
look: I am still alive—
in fact, in bud.
The Wishing Tree
by Kathleen Jamie
I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland
but in the fold
of a green hill
the tilt from one parish
into another.
To look at me
through a smirr of rain
is to taste the iron
in your own blood
because I hoard
the common currency
of longing: each wish
each secret visitation.
My limbs lift, scabbed
with greenish coins
I draw into my slow wood
fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania*.
Behind me, the land
reaches toward the Atlantic.
And though I’m poisoned
choking on the small change
of human hope,
daily beaten into me
look: I am still alive—
in fact, in bud.
*This is not a misspelling of Britannia…This is an older version of the word originally assigned to Britain by the Romans. oaw.
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