Tuesday, April 29, 2008

A Small Collection of Poems about Trees

Trees
by FS

It's a bad time for trees;
a secret half locked deep in the ground,
an aerial half vulnerable to the whims of arrogant men.
A seasonal diaspora of seeds,
their only defense;
when the Many seize the late summer winds
leaving the One behind.

Library
by Louis Jenkins

I sit down at a table and open a book of poems and move slowly in to the shadow of tall trees. They are white pines I think. The ground is covered with soft brown needles and there are signs that animals have come here silently and vanished before I could catch sight of them. But here the trail edges into a cedar swamp; wet ground, deadfall and rotting leaves. I move more carefully but rapidly, pleased with myself.

Someone else comes and sits down at the table, a serious looking young man with a large stack of books. He takes a book from the top of the stack and opens it. The book is called How to Get a High Paying Job. He flips through it and lays it down and picks up another and pages through it quickly. It is titled Moving Ahead.

We are moving ahead very rapidly now, through a second growth of popple and birch, our faces scratched and our clothes torn by the underbrush. We are moving even faster now, marking the trail, followed closely by bulldozers and crews with chain saws and representatives of the paper company.

(for more: http://www.newsfromnowhere.com/louisjenkins1.html)


Trees Lose Parts of Themselves Inside a Circle of Fog
by Francis Ponge

Inside the fog that encloses the trees, they undergo the robbing of their leaves...Thrown into confusion by a slow oxidation, and humiliated by the sap's withdrawal for the sake of the flowers and fruits, the leaves, following the hot spells of August, cling less anyway.

The up and down tunnels inside the bark deepen, and guide the moisture down to earth so as to break off with the animated parts of the tree.

The flowers are scattered, the fruits taken away. This giving up of there more animated parts, and even of parts of their body, has become, since their earliest days, a familiar practice for trees.


Pears
by FS

As I walk an aging, yellowed moon
through the levee poplars,
the pears in the orchard below,
the pears no one wanted or bothered to pick,
have at last agreed to a mutual separation
from unsympathetic limbs
and are falling to earth.
My nose discovers an earthy chemistry now quietly at work
on their ancient starches and sugars -
the chill night air is sweet with pear wine
and sour with pear vinegar - it's all a matter of time.
Soon enough, these pears will find oblivion
beneath a blanket of gold and russet leaves,
and next spring help fuel the tender but insistent grasses
sprouting like new hair
from winter's bald pate.

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