Nature Conscious: Urgent Text Message to My Childhood Neem Tree

You were rooted in their backyard, but broke the wall to rise in ours. Let us tie our clothesline across your waist. Smelled my father’s wet shirts and my mother’s maroon sari. Bore bitter fruits and shed bitter leaves. Painting our summer floor yellow, you stood bottle green and deep, cracked brown. Tucked the moon in your hair and hoisted the whimsical cuckoo who played with me. Years later, when I came home with a suitcase of pain, you gave me your leaves. I boiled them and bathed in them and wrote a poem and healed. STOP, stop with all this love. Stop for I don’t have a language to love you in. All I know is that I am happy we had a broken window and you were never hidden from me. Not even now, when I’m far away swirling your bitter medicine in my bones.

Nature Conscious is a series built from reader contributions. It is a collection of fieldnotes, moments or brief encounters with the wild, expressed through words, art, music, photographs or poetry. The series is curated by author and guest editor Aasheesh Pittie.