This week’s poem, Susan Deborah King’s “River Birch,” looks to a tree as a teacher of strength, generosity, and – to use King’s word – grace. I love this poem’s reverent attention to the birch and all its offerings, and the candor of the speaker’s searching as she looks to the tree to learn how to live.

King has led retreats on creativity and spirituality, taught creative writing at many different institutions and privately. She is the author of six full-length poetry collections and two chapbooks and has edited two anthologies. She moved to Cumberland from Minneapolis in 2015 and spends summers on Great Cranberry Island.

River Birch
By Susan Deborah King

Reason enough to have bought this house,
its tributaries of dark, peeling bark
arch over the sun room, branches,
delta-like, pouring into sky.
Oh, why not be brave, though we die?
Why not reach deep, as its roots do,
down, to go higher? Many are the morns
in these unprecedentedly horrendous times,
feeling besieged and drear, I simply sit
before it, watch birds explore it, and absorb
into my core, to steady me, its trunk,
a shaggy, sturdy, many-limbed cluster,
observing how, though stripped
in winter wind, it gives – arbor amabilis –
with such grace, without breaking.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “River Birch,” copyright 2022 by Susan Deborah King, appears by permission of the author.

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