One day walking in Argyll with my husband we encountered a wishing tree which surprised us a great deal because I didn’t know there were any in Scotland. I mean a tree people have bashed coins into for a wish or a desire – I knew they existed in Ireland but had never seen one in Scotland.
The Wishing Tree
I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland,
but in the fold
of a green hill,
the tilt from one parish
into another.
To look at me
through a smirr of rain
is to taste the iron
in your own blood;
because I bear
the common currency
of longing: each wish
each secret visitation.
My limbs lift, scabbed
with greenish coins; I draw
into my slow wood, fleur
-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania.
Beyond, the land reaches
toward the Atlantic.
And though I’m poisoned,
choking on the small change
of human hope, gently
beaten into me, look:
I am still alive;
in fact, in bud.
