Avicennia marina
By Georgina Reid
Published 12 February 2021
Soft chimneys shoot
skyward through mud
breathing in never out.
Pneumatophores, they’re called
by some. The tiny towers
inhaling air into the chambers of a world
that is a tree that is a city.
A metropolis designated once
for a Persian physician, philosopher, poet.
A man who lived a thousand years,
whose name says home
and breath and river and ocean and loss.
Did he know, too,
how to breathe mud?