Category: poems

Just over here thinking about our inevitable deaths and how the endless cycle of nature can be a comfort. This is by Laura Gilpin, from “Life and Death (for Burnett, 1945-1971)”.

 

IV

The things I know:
how the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them
So that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it

and in the spring the rabbits find it
and build their nest inside
and their young will live safely
and have their young
inside the dead tree
So that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love.

Some trees are finally blooming and the leaves aren’t far behind. I’ve shared this one before but I was thinking of the last couple lines again–the “fine then” is just such a perfect grudging note.

 

Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

This is by Langston Hughes, who I could really be more familiar with, and it feels appropriate for big uneven feelings.

Island

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.

Here’s a lovely little poem for Wednesday, something to remember as we keep on fighting the good fight. We can be the last leaves.

You Can’t
by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
translated by Fady Joudah

They will fall in the end,
those who say you can’t.
It’ll be age or boredom that overtakes them,
or lack of imagination.
Sooner or later, all leaves fall to the ground.
You can be the last leaf.
You can convince the universe
that you pose no threat
to the tree’s life.

from You Can Be the Last Leaf, 2022

The trees are a few months away from actual leaves but the buds are there. Soon.

The Trees
by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

This starts with birds (great! we love birds) and then veers into Monet (cool, ok) and ends with maybe the best depiction of grief over time I’ve ever read (oh my god that took a turn). But that’s what art is for, right? Giving you an expression for something you didn’t have before. “All the same but for the light.”

Everything Is a Sign Today
by Amanda Moore

Feather in the grass, stippled and striped:
hawk, I think. And then a man
blocking the sidewalk, child on his back,
both of them pointing binoculars toward the treetop
where I know a great horned owl nests, though I’ve never seen it.
All these birds: creatures I might never have known
had I not spent my childhood filling her feeders, naming
each genus from our perch at her kitchen table.
A falcon swoops down beside me on the path
gripping some rodent in its talons, twisting the body to kill.
Like the time a heron a few feet from our picnic blanket
plucked a whole mouse from its burrow and swept away. She had been
delighted, said we, too, should grab something special
of our own that day. Turning toward home,
I bend to collect a wrinkled postcard at the curb:
an advertisement for the Monet exhibit. How I loved
those paintings when I was younger, all of them nearly the same:
haystack, haystack, haystack. The only difference
the season and time of day, which is to say
they are like this grief these months later:
all the same but for the light.

This was another one from the Hell’s Backbone Grill newsletter and it feels really appropriate for getting used to a new job and starting the long trek through January, after all the celebrations are over. (Bonus, it’s the first time I’ve seen “bindweed” used in a poem.)

Though It Is Tough to Choose It
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Even a small discontent is enough to shut us down,
convince us that the world is cold and indifferent.
Everywhere there’s evidence of this: The slush

that falls on your car seat when you open the car door.
The carrion eaters with their great black wings
that linger beside the road. You pray for sun,

and it gets darker. Someone asks
you a question, and you see your whole life
fold into one small envelope of failure.

Then one day you hit against the same
impassable wall you always hit and this time you fall
to your knees, not because you are weak,

but because at last you are ready to be opened.
Oh sweet failure, how it leads us.
Any unhappy ending is only an invitation

to crawl into the blank pages
of the next unwritten chapter.
It was never success that transformed us—

always the breaking. Not the breaking itself,
but the mystery inside pushing through us
like bindweed through pavement

making cracks in everything
we think we know so that the world
can come streaming in.

Poems are everywhere–this one was in a Hell’s Backbone Grill email. It’s lovely and something to remember as we (I) fight the crowds and the traffic for the end of the year.

 

Big Lesson
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Today it feels so simple:
we are here to take care of each other.
How could we ever forget?
As if soil could forget
it is here to feed the trees.
As if trees could forget
they are here to feed the soil.
How could anything
ever get in the way of generosity?
How could we ever greet each other
with any words besides,
How can I help you?
As if light could forget
it is here to help illuminate.
As if dark could forget
it is here to help us heal.

I believe this is from a children’s book but it feels appropriate anyway.

 

November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.

With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.

The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.