Baobab

They climb into the sky
Inside out upside down
With its roots on its head
As some sort of a crown
Imagine an African child who perceives
What a tree looks like
And firmly believes
The tan and the shine
And the blue of the sky
In his paradise home
And really was why

The rain made them swell
With a blistering power
Gnarled knotted branches
That grew by the hour
80 feet high a huge monument to
The ancestral gods
That once walked as they do

Through the hot summer down draught
Imagining they
Could weave the bark fibres
Into baskets some day
Ropes even clothing
The uses they made
To the bark of the Baobab
That shaded their way

Inspired by mythic woods

By Jonathan Roberts