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Wollemia
The Hyacinth Review
The Hyacinth Review

Wollemia

by
May 31, 2023
Pine Trees in the Fen, Vincent van Gogh, 1884

Jennifer Harrison has written eight books of poetry, most recently…

after Eavan Boland’s ‘The Botanic Gardens’ To twine like those trees in peace and stress Before the peril of unconsciousness outside the cave . gingko and saw-tooth pine . baobabs . twining into each other’s bark climb towards the morning sun . wolves and cougars sleeping in their musty dens . she is safe inside . with her unnamed things . crude spoon . hollowed dish . bone needle . the soil floor swept smooth with thatch . sinew sewn into fur . but outside the cave . the mountain broods over endlessness . the forest receding in green waves down a thickened needle-clad valley . flinting scarp . and the cold trickle of melting snow into larger pools . roots finding humus-rich earth to hold . she stands in the cave’s mouth . a small nest flourishing in her belly . before her the oldest tree . pinus longaeva . 5000 years of weather printed into gnarled bark rings . branches splinter-sharp . she will never know the old tree’s botanic name . . . fire . shade . a sharp stick for stabbing prey . delicate leaves pressing into clay . loam and snow metamorphosing under rock . fossil . diatom . wollemia noblis . a tree naming anti-extinction . listen . to all the empires that have fallen . to Linneaus’s Systema Naturae . to time’s neglected backyard seedlings . wollemia . wollemia . wollemia . wollemia pine
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Jennifer Harrison has written eight books of poetry, most recently Anywhy (Black Pepper 2018). A new book Sideshow History will be published in 2022. She manages The Dax Poetry Collection housed in the Dax Centre at the University of Melbourne and is Chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Art and Psychiatry Section. A new collection After. Echoes will feature poems that respond to the work of Irish poet, Eavan Boland (1944- 2020). Jennifer received the 2012 Christopher Brennan Award for sustained achievement in Australian poetry.

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