A solitary baobab tree in the African savanna — Adansonia holding the warm sunset light in its massive trunk and outstretched branches.
When I stand before you,
time brushes past me;
you, instead, pierce it
and stand like the world’s pulse.
We live the same hour
from different directions.
Somewhere between the far north of Australia
and the cough of Saharan dust,
somewhere inside the light of Madagascar,
you receive millennia of starlight and rain.
You are not a tree that stores water—
you are a living thing that keeps time.
In months with no rain,
you shoulder a sky’s worth of thirst.
The water you hold
turns your body into shade;
with it you veil the burning sun,
you soften the desert’s cracking breath.
They call it survival.
I know it as the convulsion of love,
the body’s last, fierce insistence to remain.
Each time the sun’s knife
and the sand-wind flense your skin,
you grow thicker, rougher.
Love leaves marks on your bark;
you answer with scars.
In the hide that hardens,
sorrow becomes steady.
Your fruit—its white pulp
shining like quiet flesh under light—
tells us what we already know:
this is no simple sweetness.
It is a yield made of tears.
We call it vitamin C,
but it is grief crystallized into mercy.
Birds know it,
cheetahs and monkeys know it;
even the drifting sand knows.
From your seeds we press oil.
People smooth it on their faces,
unaware and aware:
it is not a cosmetic,
it is your luminous tear—
love made tangible.
Wind lingers around your waist;
starlight sleeps on your shoulders.
Where their breaths have entered,
you widen—sideways, inward—
until refuge itself has a shape.
Today, a quiet river—
vast as a rumor of stars—
moves inside you.
Not mere moisture,
but blood of constellations stored in cells.
The current rounds your heart;
your trunk hums almost inaudibly.
Birds drowse to that vibration;
at night they dream
to your metronome of light.
You drink the sky
and listen to the ground.
Beneath you lies the craton—
the first bone of Earth,
a place where lava-blood once cooled
and never fully slept.
There you press one ear,
still hearing
a three-billion-year heartbeat.
Through ages of sandfall
your roots refuse to forget.
Minerals rise along your vessels;
at the leaflet’s tip
they glitter like small, patient metals.
Their tremor braids
with wind and star and brightness,
and a poem is etched
in every cell of you.
In your smallest seed
a hearth still glows:
the primeval heart of Earth,
where a child of fire curled and breathed.
On that uncooled ground
you stand again today,
writing a quiet love-poem
with starlight, sunlight, and sandstorm.
I know it now:
the wide water coursing your flesh
resembles the world’s own arteries.
Your stillness
is the planet’s heart
made visible.
— not a store of water,
but a keeper of time;
a house for wind and beasts;
a prayer that thickened into bark.
