‘With Earth as My Witness’: Poetry as meditation on the profane and sacred, the human and the divine

“Summoning Earth”, one of the five elements of nature as a witness, Tansy Troy’s poems arrive in With Earth as My Witness as though they are incantations ringing through the supreme silence of the universe. They are chroniclers of time and guardian angels of “karmic ends, completing narratives” before the great extinction.

In the offerings to “petals, bone, stone and leaf”, time stands still as the Bodhi tree speaks in a voice ripened by wind and rain, its leaves remembering and “replicating the beauteous form of Siddhartha”. The hibiscus seeks him out as he wanders through the village, offering her scarlet-crimson speech. Prayers rise as a dragon’s rumble under the Bodhi Tree. In the land where these poems belong, one is released from the mortal anxieties and insecurities, and one turns deeper into the symbiotic relationship between nature and human being. The raven with her “blue knowing” and “darkling intuition” disappears through the earth’s secret doors, showing us the way.

Returning to previous lifetimes

There is a greater degree of peace and contentment in relinquishing the burdens imposed by material pursuits. Elated to be at last released from “the weight of turquoise crowns” and “heaviness of clod,” the last Queen of Testa Kha returns to “the wilderness...

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