Heart to Leaf
Anne Elvey
on Bunurung Country, Frankston Reservoir and Frankston Nature Conservation Reserve, May 2023 Small hands of tea tree, grey greening – I breathe them, in the almost rain. Wind picks up, moistens my face. My body keeps this footfall, alive like leaf. Steady. My skin is a being immersed – arriving porous, soul opened to lungs’ verdure – while invasions continue. Plant’s flesh attaches to thin twigs, to air, to some tender spirit that inhabits me, neither of us colonising the other, though the impact is now. The Colony places us together, in bush fused with plantation and care, beside another stemmed waterway – here – home to hardheads and frogs. The track we took is named for kookaburras. I hear one as we approach the car, freshened by stride and gust, willing to be unentitled
Note: The Colony refers to the ongoing colony called Australia; see, for example, Chelsea Watego, <i>Another Day in the Colony </i>(UQP 2021), cited with permission.
The science behind the piece:
The poem ‘Heart to leaf’ expands from a sense of synergies between plants and humans to express a possibility for transformative interrelationship with plants in the context of a place that is colonised multiply through the theft of Bunurong land, the damming of a waterway and evidence of a pine plantation, as well as the regrowth of bush. In his article, ‘On Being Called by Plants: Phytopoetics and the Phytosphere’, Plant Perspectives, vol. 1, no. 2 (2024): John C Ryan describes poetics that connect with three aspects of the phytosphere: the rhizosphere, the phyllosphere and the endosphere. My poem begins with an engagement with the phyllosphere, the leafy surfaces of plants as habitat for microorganisms; in proximity to leaves the poet is changed by the encounter, entering a hybrid state of relationship with leaf that prompts desire for a counter-colonial relation to place.
Listen to Anne read the poem: