Manuel Cortez and the Immortal Tree
“A tree that is left growing in its natural state is a crude thing” Minamoto no Shitagō
There was nothing left for me
except to chase the ghosts of Cabral,
Columbus and de Gama
to the edge of the world
which is where I found them
with the rising sun.
At first I was amused
by these little trees,
kept by little people.
I never acquired my master’s taste for deadwood.
The grey ropes coiling and matting the trunk,
wide brooms and ball crowns,
his eye for grafting
a fragile species onto firmer roots.
I preferred the chokkan bonsai
the formal upright style. It reminded me
of Lisbon, before the earthquake,
and the lingering doubts.
No storm has ever harmed them
the nurserymen, training their bonsai into form
a forest of akadama bowls
I came to admire the bonsais’ talent
for twisting around guide wires,
into something designed,
foreseen.
And how a master exploits
the bonsai’s daily thirst for light
each lean preceded by a desire to lean.
The secret is letting them believe
they’re not dwarfs, rather
Men are giants.
The finest bonsai in Edo
were clipped from a sacred tree
found in the scarred earth
of a newly opened fault line.
A well-trained bonsai outlives her master
but through careful trimming and pruning
he too will live forever.
Does this not show how far we’ve come?
Samatar Elmi is a poet and poetry editor for Helicon magazine. A mentee of Dorothea Smartt’s on the Young Inscribe programme, he has been published in the Young Inscribe Anthology, Scarf, Decanto, and Exiled Writers Ink. Samatar is a resident poet at Numbi and has performed for the Arvon foundation. Samatar also translates Somali poetry, focussing on the work of Osman Gabyaee.