Trauma and Trees
Bailey Judis
A Poetry Collection 2026
The Arborist
They say only wise ones can speak to the trees.
But I talk to them sometimes,
because in our absent reverence,
we lost the stories of our elders,
and the trees don’t apologize
if I stop to listen.
Emotion
A sentient spark for which
I have no name,
Takes root within my soul.
Brittle bones awaken,
Purple dahlias drip from dewy lashes,
Vines burst renewed through
Weathered limbs, and rain
Washes away naked numbness.
The beat of my life drum
Begins again.
Moss
Find me gazing North and
blanketed beneath a feathered canopy,
My nightdress crusted in brown.
I lay seemingly dead under a solar storm,
My veins aching with thirst, though
In eternal slumber, time is still.
I have nothing to give
Yet the forest to hold as
I wait with absent breath
for the rain to come.
Anxiety
I run from her and
follow my spirit into the trees.
Beneath a golden rain of autumn tears,
I listen to woven,
whispered memories as they rustle
through birchbark branches:
stories from ferns born in
the age of monsters,
lullabies from the slumbering moss,
medicine from the blackberry bramble,
and myths from the
star leafed maple.
And when Anxiety finds me again,
nestled beneath the hawthorns,
she pools down beside me on the leaves,
my dark guardian of shadow,
and lets me sleep.
Trauma and Trees
If I may whisper a
truth this once,
I want to sleep in the forest
where only the trees
can awaken unspoken metaphors
slumbering like moss in my soul.
Trees eight hundred years old,
I think they know.
Without words, they sense
the unrooted trauma
braided like vines down my back,
twisted like spidery
veins across my soul.