Four Poems by Tracie Nichols

by Tracie Nichols

I’m not certain if this context is necessary, but it feels important to include it. Like so many survivors, my abuse experiences pushed me outside my body—fragmented me—which at first helped me survive, then, of course, didn’t. So I re-learned my body and mapped the fertile ground of embodiment by connecting with the more-than-human world and began crafting a collage of me. Wordscapes began to unfurl themselves from my bones sparked by this deeply felt connection with trees, stones, streams—all things wild. This is a gathering of four poems from a current project that combines these body-based poem snippets with the idea of assembling art from fragments. Phrases are reused in new ways in new poems, like the earth reuses leaves that fall. Each new poem has a life of its own, yet is interwoven with the ecosystem of its companion poems.

Spring Breaks

Sap forced to rise.

To relinquish its sugar

for tiny tight-furled leaves.

Chickadees trace

droplets of song from

bough to genuflecting bough.

I roll the sweetness

of life across

my tongue—

sip new air and

speak rivers and

mountains.

Half the world

is breaking,

how can you not be?

Recovery

White pine branch script

scrawled across skies

no long spitting snow—

chickadees trace droplets

of song from bough to 

genuflecting bough—

and a friend,

back after months of 

hospitals and hell

begins the long, slow, forgetting. 

The Mercy of Leaves

Chickadees trace droplets

of song from bough to

genuflecting bough—

a reverence of sound

and movement.

Out along the corrugated

edge of awareness

—life from death from life—

the mercy of leaves,

a million verdant voices aligned.

Everything that matters

is here.

Essential

Deep in the fertile ooze

oxygen is not optional.

I roll the sweetness of life 

across my tongue—

speak rivers and mountains

from between my legs.

This forest has made me 

her own.

Everything that matters

is here.