Pascale Petit has published four poetry collections including The Huntress and The Zoo Father, which were both shortlisted for the UK’s T.S. Eliot Prize and were books of the year in The Times Literary Supplement. Her latest is The Treekeeper’s Tale (2008) and forthcoming in autumn 2009 The Thorn Necklace: Forty poems after Frida Kahlo (illustrated). The Poetry Book Society and Arts Council named her as one of the Next Generation Poets in 2004 and she has won numerous writing awards. Her poems are translated into many languages. She originally trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and has worked as editor of Poetry London 1989–2005. She is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University 2007–9 and tutors for Oxford University, The Poetry School and Tate Modern.

Quelle: poetry p f

The Treekeeper's Tale

I have set up house in the hollow trunk of a giant redwood.
My bed is a mat of pine needles. Cones drop their spirals

on my face as I sleep. I have the usual flying dreams.
But all I know when I wake is that this bark is my vessel

as I hurtle through space. Once, I was rocked in a cradle
carved from a coast redwood, its lullabies were my coracle.

I searched for that singing grove and became its guardian.
There are days when the wind plays each tree

like a new instrument in the forest-orchestra.
On wild nights mine is a flute. After years of solitude

I have started to hear its song. I lie staring at the stars
until the growth rings enclose me in hoops –

choirs of concentric colours, as if my tree is remembering
the music of the spheres. And I almost remember speaking

my first word, how it flew out of my mouth like a dove.
I have forgotten how another of my kind sounds.

published in collection The Treekeeper's Tale, 2008
Seren Books, ISBN 978-1-85411-471-6