By SONIA CHAJET WIDES

waving forests carpet tree branches
trunks, Dragon scales and hair sprouting
sometimes so dense that the bark is made invisible
the tree
becomes a tower gorgeous
fractal ferns
towers of themselves, sporing spirals

The day after I met them
they died
in wilt, black, dry
crumpled
into the rest of the surface, I mourned
my miraculous moment of witnessing

Then it thundered, summer thunder into vapor
Their green vibrated as if by magic
returned
And only later did I learn
they were called resurrection

In a zoomed in photo from below a tree
the moss made of ferns
is indistinguishable from a forest;
I turn to topography
to understand this terrain as a planet,
how mountains piercing the air make this a surface
that when zoomed out is swathed, ensconced
in a smoothing
atmosphere marbleizing mountains
fractalizing the earth

When astronauts are far enough in space they can hold their thumbs up and obscure
the whole earth
and in doing so obscure each person, plant, and thing
each mountain, cloud and piece of paper,
speck of dust
It is hard to know if those things exist
anymore beneath
the fingerprint and the thumb

What has never comforted me is
the idea of my smallness

When I witness the tumble out of a camera towards space
towards fingerprint
earth towards swirling solar systems, spirals into sudden galaxies,
topography obscured
my stomach lurches
but I am not nothing

Because how can the small be rendered
irrelevant, how
can the largeness of the world not make me feel
the millions of ferns sporing, held under my thumb


Writer | Sonia Chajet Wides ’25 | schajetwides25@amherst.edu
Editor | Max Pasakorn | mpasakorn@amherst.edu