Ogham (rhymes with “poem”) was the alphabet of the Gaels between 300 and 600 AD and the first written form of the Irish language. Inscriptions still exist throughout Ireland and in those places in the British Isles settled by the Irish—Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and Cornwall. Ogham is written with a tree-like script consisting of a trunk and branches and is read from bottom to top, like climbing a tree. The word for “tree” and “wood” in Old Irish, fid (plural feda), also means “letter,” so that writing, in a sense, creates a grove or a forest. Because Ogham pairs each of its twenty letters with a different species of tree or bush, it has been called a “tree alphabet.”
When I first learned of Ogham, I was delighted. “A people who read the forest, a culture literate in trees,” wanted the grace and power of trees to accompany every word they wrote. I was curious to learn more.
When a writing residency brough me to Ireland in 2014, I traveled beforehand and sought out Ogham stones and other remnants of ancient Ireland. I visited holy wells and holy trees that still exist in the landscape and pondered the worldview that created a tree alphabet. Poems began to suggest themselves, as if the land and its features were speaking to me. I aspired to write 20 poems for the 20 trees of Ogham. To do so, I had to become more “literate in trees” as well as in Irish mythology and history. I publish these and related poems to celebrate trees and to underline their human importance, not just for their material and ecological value but as a source of inspiration and spiritual sustenance.
Mark D. Hart’s first book, Boy Singing to Cattle (Pearl Editions, 2013), won the Pearl Poetry Prize and was a 2014 finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. His second book of poetry, The Joy of Blasphemy, was published by Off the Common Press in 2018. He has been a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in private practice, the guiding teacher for the Bodhisara Dharma Community, and a chaplain at Amherst College. He holds a doctorate in theology from Boston College and a masters in counseling from Seattle University and has taught religious studies at both Seattle University and Smith College. He grew up on a wheat farm in the Palouse region of eastern Washington State and now lives in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
