Max, if I could love this poem more, I don't know how it could be. Very
profoundly beautiful. This piece offers a wonderful feeling, and its
precision is a joy.
Sheila, thanking you.
On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 4:49 AM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Trees
>
> I shall die without learning the names
> of these trees, and then it won't matter.
>
> How good in the park to be on more
> than nodding terms - on first-name speaking terms!
>
> A few of course I know, some even
> by botanical names - cupressus
>
> macrocarpa is a favourite,
> thanks to my Taranaki childhood.
>
> There they made dairy-farm windbreaks,
> melancholy, much-mutilated;
>
> lawsoniana - big hedge we kids crawled
> tunnelling darkly through, greening our limbs;
>
> pinus insignis, so dominant
> south of Auckland, where after passing
>
> lush Waikato pastures, soon you
> enter a zone of nothing but insignis,
>
> sinisterly totalitarian
> everywhere - insignis and in health,
>
> as we used to say. Right to the peak
> of steep mountains, they stood tall.
>
> Their clear-felled miles: desolate -
> soon replanted, shooting densely up.
>
> Tree-ferns at their margins spoke
> of the old bush - fronds to be fond of.
>
> Cabbage-trees! - statuesque dignity,
> deserving prouder names. Cordylines
>
> (I had to look them up) - respectable -
> name without nostalgia factor.
>
> The tree-names lacking are European:
> all those novels I've read about folk
>
> under their elms, beech, oaks, what-have-you -
> oaks I'm happy with, vague on the rest.
>
> Fondling oakleaves and acorns is like
> a dialogue annually renewed.
>
> Those others - their leaves die and fall,
> and are renewed half-noticed,
>
> unfocused. At the Botanics,
> I rush from tree to tree thinking Now
>
> I know you - till I leave, vaguely,
> as when dashing round a gallery
>
> with countless labels calling Remember me.
> The tree that saw me through childhood illness
>
> watching at my window, filtering sun
> and moon, I never thanked nor knew its name.
>
> Macrocarpa, lawsoniana - thanks.
>
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