Sanskrit

Threatened in the wild, razed for firewood, its bark

once the repository of prayers,

this Himalayan birch – planted to screen us

from our neighbour’s blind back bedroom windows

or vice versa – has, almost overnight

it seems, in a tardy autumn, turned

from pastoral green to gold, the gilt

of palaces and of temples, a wind-

shivered, aureate filigree, tear-shaped,

that burnishes the heart. When leaves have gone

bricks and pebble-dash where nothing happens

will appear obscurely as if through fingers

spread wide to mitigate the sunlight.

A sliver of bark like a leaf of paper

will catch in the bamboo beneath the tree.

Maybe this year or next we will inscribe,

with the finest brush, the Sanskrit prayer:

‘May we never quarrel!’.