The Best of Speaking Tree: v. 6

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Harjo also makes use of several other poetic techniques. These include alliteration, enjambment, personification and zoomorphism. The first on this list, alliteration, occurs when words are used in succession, or at least appear close together, and begin with the same letter. For example, “deepest-rooted” and “dream” in line fifteen and “drink,”“deep” and “drinkable” in line twenty-one. This is the message of the Lotus Sutra – that each human being innately possesses the spiritual treasures of infinite capacity and an enlightened state of life. In contemporary terms, this means that we should not give up before taking action, feeling powerless and small in the face of the magnitude of challenges such as climate change. Instead, we should summon unwavering belief in the power that exists within us to move our lives and society in a better direction and work together in solidarity with other like-minded people. In the next lines of ‘Speaking Tree’Harjo goes on to list off something else that “Some people” are incapable of understanding, from singing to crying in anguish. These same people are can’t see the beauty and value in trees, nor intuit their “broken and bereft” moments. When the poem text begins, Harjo starts a list of things that are “unspeakable”. These things all belong to the “genealogy of the broken”, or a line of descent that has been interrupted. First, the reader will think about human lives and loss. Harjo emphasizes this association through the description of “the smell of coffee and no one there”. This scene speaks to loneliness and solitude. Someone who should be present isn’t. She also personifies the wind as another representative of broken genealogies. It is “shy” and moving through leaves “after a massacre”. Harjo is interested in the silence that’s left behind.

This is certainly a true statement and Harjo’s own position on it is made clear in the next line. She says that those who disregard the sentience of trees, “do not understand poetry”. These two things go hand in hand, not just that the trees and poetry are connected, but that trees are poetry. Utilizing personification again, Harjo adds that she has “heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down”. Through close looking, care, and understanding she has learned to speak tree, as the title suggests. The next lines convey their words to the reader. Finding solutions to the challenges posed by climate change will not be easy. People at the grassroots need to take action in diverse fields as Maathai did. I believe that young people will play a pivotal role in this challenge.

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Allow yourself to abandon apathy and be moved to action.” These are the powerful words of Wangari Maathai, who launched a tree-planting movement that has spread throughout Africa and the world. Her conviction echoes the Buddhist belief that each individual possesses unlimited potential and the power to generate change. While protecting children and young people from the impacts of disaster exacerbated by climate change is a challenge we must work on together, it is also vital that the young generation gets involved in these efforts as protagonists. With young people in the forefront, we must all take action to create with our own hands the future we envision. In this way, our efforts for positive change will ultimately encompass the entire planet.

It is quite easy to relate these lines to our contemporary world and way in which the majority of the human race has, and does, treat the planet. Considerations of non-human life and the worth it has, separate from what it can do for humanity, are at the root of the issue. The global tree-planting movement, which has seen billions of trees planted worldwide, initially began with the planting of just a few trees by Maathai and her colleagues in her native Kenya.Harjo goes on to speak about herself. She says that she is very different from these other people. She is, Harjo sees, hears, and feels their value and has even contemplated what it would be like to give up her human life for one more physically connected to the earth. She would reside in the same spot, from “sunrise” to “sunset”. This cannot happen, and to that end, she admits that she can’t move through all the “realms”. There’s no way to completely understand or experience the lives of other beings on the planet. She has a “yearning” she says is impossible to handle alone in the dark. Speaking Tree‘ by Joy Harjo is a single stanza poem made up of twenty-one lines. These lines do not follow a specific rhyme scheme, but there are instances of half-rhyme. Harjo begins this work with an epigraph or a short quote or phrase at the start of a poem or book. In this case, she quotes Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros. The quote is very closely related to the content of Speaking Tree. Both Cisneros and Harjo express an interest in the lives of trees and what it means to connect with nature.