Elephantine Baobab [Free Verse]

It's called 
Hatiyan-ka-Jhad
because it looks like 
a huddled herd of elephants --
not only in its corpulence
but also with its rough, gray skin.

So rotund at its base
that it's hard to figure
how its slowly slimming upward taper 
can come to twiggy ends,
and not be a mile tall.

The branches are overly muscular, 
like a bodybuilder who got carried away,
moving from strong and vigorous 
into the domain of science fiction mishap.

It has its own mythology -- 
multiple creation tales about 
how its seed got from Madagascar
to the middle of India half a millennium ago:
tales of fakirs and royal envoys.

It's even been said that the Forty Thieves,
the ones who tormented Ali Baba,
used its hollow as their cache cave.

But it refuses to respond to "Open Sesame" --
so I guess we'll never know.

Tree of a Thousand Twigs [Free Verse]

When monsoon rains soaked the soil,
that old tree toppled.

They cut it out of the roadway,
&
I went out to count its rings,
but found it not with hundreds of rings,
but hundreds of trunks --
many no more than twigs.

What a mighty tree 
a pile of twigs pressed together 
can make,
& 
now it's gone.

Knotty Tree [Haiku]

the knotty tree
stretches wide to reach light --
strength from warped fibers

DAILY PHOTO: Kaindy Lake, Kazakhstan

Taken in the Summer of 2019 at Kaindy Lake

The submerged trees [below] for which Kaindy Lake is famed came about when part of the mountain sloughed off to create a natural dam and reservoir [above.]

Sprout [Haiku]

a seed sprouts,
stretching toward the light
to be infinite

Shades of Green [Haiku]

myriad greens
texture the mountain,
when the sun is out

DAILY PHOTO: Foggy, Mossy Forest

Taken in May of 2022 on the trail between Tsoka and Dzongri in Sikkim