of course the trees are my friends
they are like me ~ busy busy bees
growing in slow motion

they embrace me
when I enter the garden
they remember that I water them

they teach me how to be still
they teach me how to be busy busy busy
only very very slowly

they teach me how to breathe
when we breathe in to each other
it’s like long slow kisses

© Richard James Allen

 
Previously published in Kit Kelen and Mark Carthew (eds), When the Moon Is Swimming Naked: Australasian Poetry for the Chinese Youngster (Flying Island Books, an imprint of ASM and Cerberus Press, 2014) and in Richard James Allen, Fixing the Broken Nightingale (Flying Island Books, an imprint of ASM and Cerberus Press, 2014).

The author’s book of poems Fixing the Broken Nightingale, can be purchased directly through  http://www.fixingthebrokennightingale.com/

“Allen’s is a peripatetic eye… enthusiastic, despairing, loving, frantic. Here is a poet who dares to be vulnerable and awed.”  Les Wicks