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Hardwood


.


           Hardwood


I rise each day and find these trees
stand exactly where they did the day before,
stood unafraid in a darkened wood
through the cold and empty hours
to welcome in a new day’s pearly light.
But each day, it seems, I also find another
who has ventured past that unseen door,
has left us, we can only pray,
for something good and something more
and something less than standing through the night.

Proud these trees stood still when we returned
from the solemn procession and burial,
on a day of tears and a last goodbye, of dying flowers,
the lifting of a polished hardwood casket.
And though weary when returning from the funeral,
I take time tonight to walk beside the wood
and of these hardwood trees and life I ask it:
where stand and how grow until the day it’s I
who, dressed in hardwood, awaits a morning bright?


.
Oct/10/2010, 8:20 pm Link to this post Send Email to GaryBFitzgerald   Send PM to GaryBFitzgerald
 
GaryBFitzgerald Profile
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Re: Hardwood


Comment, critique and/or review of this poem welcome.

GBF
Oct/10/2010, 8:33 pm Link to this post Send Email to GaryBFitzgerald   Send PM to GaryBFitzgerald
 
Terreson Profile
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Re: Hardwood


This is a poem.

Tere
Oct/10/2010, 11:11 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
libramoon Profile
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Re: Hardwood



I rise each day and find these trees
stand exactly where they did the day before,
stood unafraid in a darkened wood
through the cold and empty hours
to welcome in a new day’s pearly light.


I love this image of the trees standing bravely through the night.

Oct/11/2010, 12:12 am Link to this post Send Email to libramoon   Send PM to libramoon Blog
 
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Re: Hardwood


Libramoon: Thank you. I am so happy that you like my poem. After all, that's why I write them.

Tere: Thanks, man! You have inspired me to post another poem. You may remember this one. I posted it on Poets.net, what...three or four years ago? It is the first one you ever commented on. I was very gratified.

It's called 'Fields'.

GBF
Oct/11/2010, 8:48 pm Link to this post Send Email to GaryBFitzgerald   Send PM to GaryBFitzgerald
 
libramoon Profile
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Re: Hardwood


The Sabbath Poems, 1993, I -- Wendell Berry

 
 
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over the grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
 
~ Wendell Berry ~
 
(The Sabbath Poems, 1993, I)
Nov/3/2010, 6:17 pm Link to this post Send Email to libramoon   Send PM to libramoon Blog
 
Terreson Profile
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Re: Hardwood


Libra, I do enjoy how poets, some poets at least, enter into their exchanges with each other through poetry. Makes sense, right? It is our langue francaise.

W. Berry; such an under-rated poet.

Tere
Nov/4/2010, 6:28 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
GaryBFitzgerald Profile
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Re: Hardwood


Thank you, Libramoon. In reply:

 

.
           Hello
 

Hello, everybody.
I miss you all.
I'm sorry I haven't been
to see you, but
it's not my fault. After all,
you're buried all over
the damned country.
I can't drive that far.
But being that you're dead,
I figure you can hear me
anyway.
Hello, everybody.
I miss you.


.
Copyright 2008 – HARDWOOD-77 Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald


.
This poem is now dedicated to Brian Salchert, well known on the poetry blogs. Of all 77 poems in my book HARDWOOD, this is the one he chose to post on his website. I thought it was an odd selection.

Maybe not. Brian passed away a few months later.


.
Nov/6/2010, 7:20 pm Link to this post Send Email to GaryBFitzgerald   Send PM to GaryBFitzgerald
 
libramoon Profile
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Re: Hardwood


I love the dark hours -- Ranier Maria Rilke
 
 
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
 
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.
 
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:
 
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.
 
 
~ Ranier Maria Rilke ~
 
 
(Rilke’s Book of Hours:Love Poems to God, trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
 
 
 
 
 


Web version: http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Love_the_Dark_Hours.html
 
Web archive of Panhala postings: http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html
Nov/9/2010, 4:45 pm Link to this post Send Email to libramoon   Send PM to libramoon Blog
 
culdesac101 Profile
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Re: Hardwood


"In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime"

-John Keats (from in drear-nighted december)
Nov/10/2010, 8:57 am Link to this post Send Email to culdesac101   Send PM to culdesac101
 
GaryBFitzgerald Profile
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Re: Hardwood


           Hope in Winter


Naked limbs now thin and empty
vein December’s gray,
skeletal branches reaching desperately
to the sky,
but one tree still thick with leaves
stands full against these ponderous clouds
as if defying Winter and calling
even death a cruel joke.

Then the blackbirds all flew off
and an empty bone-bare tree
to dark victorious clouds was traded
for a puff of feathered smoke.



Copyright 2008 - HARDWOOD-77 Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald


Last edited by GaryBFitzgerald, Nov/10/2010, 11:40 pm
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culdesac101 Profile
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Re: Hardwood


Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

-Thomas Hardy (from In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’)
Nov/11/2010, 10:03 am Link to this post Send Email to culdesac101   Send PM to culdesac101
 
Terreson Profile
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Re: Hardwood


An old poem, one of the earliest still standing, going back to '74, with which I enter into the exchange ya'll have set up.

Cafe Window

Thick glass, picture glass,
solid sheer made of sand and fire.
A window set to stand in place,
a window that does not reach sky or earth,
a window through which this room leans
polished to a fine line clear.

The glass framed before me
was cut and fitted to seal in space
a lone old tree in a vacant park.
With jagged limbs and trunk all nude,
with veins bled of rich soil spittle,
the tree cuts rifts in gray town fog,
rifts writing script against the sky,
script spelling the time out for
hands too numb to cover their eyes.

On December's shore there is this man
swinging on tree's death door.

Tere
Nov/12/2010, 3:02 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
GaryBFitzgerald Profile
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Re: Hardwood


.


I screech!
I wail,
shout, but
you never hear this anguish.
You don’t hear
the shriek of eighty years
untouched,
destroyed in minutes
when the tree topples,
torn into the crashing forest.
You feel the throb
of a landed fish
choking on breath
without substance.
You don’t hear it cry.
You know nothing
of the starving, throbbing
crowds on all
the continents, landed,
gasping on the hook
of affluence.
They wail.
I screech!
Children, flesh dissolving
to fuel engines which
putter & stop…
diseased, an eight year
ligament & barely brittle
bone sack, shrunken,
collapses,
shrieks. Turn the
channel.


Copyright 2005 - Evolving: Poems 1965-2005, Gary B. Fitzgerald
Nov/12/2010, 8:26 pm Link to this post Send Email to GaryBFitzgerald   Send PM to GaryBFitzgerald
 
culdesac101 Profile
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Re: Hardwood


"In this smokeless harrier desolation
I have surmounted inscrutable errata
under two electric polar moons
shifting between the colours of slate-blue & magenta

the Andean Hill Star
hovering in these Martian x-ray wastes
the iridescent enigma
my centripetal wings
beating against the soul of cartographical surcease
with its enervated distension
with its migrating sun loss

the triple atmosphere corroded
by tense elliptical static
by the drainage from barbarous glacial nerves
so that the strange contentions of Phobos
make the human staggering genetic
less & less
a catalog of spectrums
less & less a factor
where ciphers are beheaded

humankind
now tending to gaze from a portico of gangrene
from model as nervous collective




-Will Alexander(from Above the Human Nerve Domain)

Last edited by culdesac101, Nov/16/2010, 1:50 am
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Re: Hardwood


Beautiful poems by the way Tere & Gary. Enjoyed!
Nov/16/2010, 1:51 am Link to this post Send Email to culdesac101   Send PM to culdesac101
 
Terreson Profile
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Re: Hardwood


Thanks, Cul. Mine is less a creative product, more a matter of reportage.

Tere
Nov/16/2010, 6:58 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
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Re: Hardwood


           1.


A sparrow flies, spreads wide small wings
and tilts the spin of Saturn’s rings.
A star explodes and shifts a moon,
which bends the time from May ‘til June.
Comets swing and swirl and blow…
what man sees where sparrows go?
Snake eats bird; a faultless crime
that shapes the flow of space and time.

These are but waves which break a sea
that still one ocean has to be:
a seething field without a shore
where here is then, and less is more.
Of neutron, bird and galaxy,
of void and mass and energy.
The quivering net of being now
has always been, and still is, Tao.


           2.


The flute’s sweet note is like a cat:
a minor change from this to that.
Hear the balance…low or high?
A vibration flux that’s passing by.
Each note a sound, distinct, alone;
yet the same air flows to make each tone.
The cat will come and near me lie,
a vibration flux just passing by.

Gardens, horses, stones and storks;
electrons, photons, muons, quarks:
they come, then fade, from thin air burst,
an air not thin, but full, immersed
in constant movement, charged with change
that first will build, then rearrange.
The patterns formed, what tongue can say?
Enough is said when called the way.


           3.


A whale descends and music’s heard
in instrument and written word,
but not one song has yet to rhyme
the tone of space and pitch of time.
We note the rhythm, hear the beat
of gravity and speed and heat;
that light and space can bend we know,
but what man walks where whales can go?

We sense the balanced entity,
the shadow of a harmony;
a tune which ties to storms on Mars
the X-ray pulse of neutron stars;
yet neither word nor song nor math
can read the signs upon the path.
No lexicon has shown us how
so this, as well, we can call Tao.


           4.


And stars, so huge, are lost in sky,
light years away yet still nearby.
And atoms spinning in their dance
are structured with less form than chance.
And man’s a microbe, bound to Earth;
A tiny speck against her girth.
Built from water, fruit and bread,
a moment’s balance, then, is dead.

And man’s a planet, large and wide
where generations lived and died,
whose tissues stretch like hill and plain;
a multitude in every vein.
So small and great, the shapes proceed
in nebulae and apple seed.
As big as space, as small as light,
in patterns near and in plain sight.


.
Copyright 2005 - Evolving:Poems 1965-2005, Gary B. Fitzgerald

Written 1981 - Age 29

I am Evolving

.
Nov/19/2010, 9:39 pm Link to this post Send Email to GaryBFitzgerald   Send PM to GaryBFitzgerald
 
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Re: Hardwood


This has to have been the best thread ever.

We need to do this "poem to poem" thing again.
May/12/2011, 11:33 pm Link to this post Send Email to GaryBFitzgerald   Send PM to GaryBFitzgerald
 


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