Forest

Poet and academic Dr David Kelly spent time with the forest paintings and wrote in direct response. What follows arrived unedited, in a single sitting.

The visual spacing is the poet's own — the intervals between lines echoing the intervals between trees.

What would the forest cry 
If a forest could cry out in a way that would make you know it were crying?

It would, I expect, cry out 
"I am forest" 
In the thick dialect of foliage 
The rich lexicon of leaf mould
Under the tongue of it.

Peat moss.

It might cry out. "I am forest. 
You may not enter".

Though gaps between trunks tell you otherwise.

Though the forest forbids you
It knows you will enter it anyway.

At first, 
You might think to push past its branches 
To muscle your way to the hinterland.

But where the thickets are welcoming, 
You brush past them lightly 
Surprised at soft dust of yellow and ochre 
Dusting your shoulder like pollen spores

Or smeared across it like the residue of sap.

Dazed you might stand and take stock: 
Look back at the threshold, down the fronds 
Of each thoroughfare you passed through.

"I am the forest"

That's what I would cry out anyway, 
If I were a forest

But I am misspoken. 
I am not even woodland.

Yet ache to my roots to be part of it 
As the roots of all trees move somewhere beyond and beneath.


— Dr. David Kelly

Reflections

David Kelly’s poem emerged directly from sustained time spent with the forest paintings.

What struck me was not illustration or interpretation, but recognition — a shared sense of threshold, concealment, and unstable entry. Certain phrases seemed to articulate something already present in the painted surfaces: dusting, residue, interruption, roots moving somewhere “beyond and beneath.”

The relationship between poem and painting remains intentionally unresolved. Neither explains the other completely.