Beginnings, journeys, and fate, featuring poems by Maryhelen Snyder, Shirley Windward and Gilbert Arzola.
7 minutes
TRANSCRIPT
It’s December. Thanksgiving’s past. It’s time to start thinking about the Solstice and Christmas and Kwaanza and Chanuka. And it’s time to remember the trees. In most of the country, the leaves have fallen, and the deciduous trees are mere skeletons of their former selves.
Coincidentally, this week, December 6, is Joyce Kilmer’s birthday. In addition to being a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, Kilmer was a poet. Many of his poems were about beauty in nature and values and subjects that were shaped by his strong belief in Catholicism. His most famous poem, of course, “Trees:”
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Joyce Kilmer was only 31 when he was killed during a WWI battle.
But I digress. On this episode of Burning Bright, three Passager poems that at least involve trees.
First, a poem by 2016 Passager Poet Maryhelen Snyder that like Kilmer, interweaves nature and a sense of The Creator: “The Cutting Room Floor.”
I walk outside to meet the evening light
that pours itself over my small piece of the world.
I walk towards its throbbing center there
past the next hill. The igniting fire. The god
who creates the world of separate things.
I am one center, the sun the other.
It is April, when green is attached to the sun
by an uncut cord, when trees are fresh and wet
as though from the womb. In the beginning
when God creates the World in six days,
there is the briefest of pauses between creation
and naming, between naming and seeing it as good.
Or perhaps there is no pause at all. We discover
we can run the film backward to its still point before
the Beginning, the naming, the division, so that
the tree, nestled like a suckling against the evening sky, is born
into its nameless self, again and again, indivisible, the birds hidden in its
branches and the wind trembling in its leaves.
And God is resting now, on the seventh day,
here on the cutting room floor.
Maryhelen Snyder’s poem “The Cutting Room Floor” from Passager Issue 61.
Shirley Windward said that she regards poetry as one vehicle worthy of carrying to others the deeper messages of art and of life itself. Here’s her poem “The Tamarisk Tree.”
The warm sand at the bottom of the canyon
cups hip and shoulder, shifting me toward
the river that chuckles three feet from
my chin. Sweet wren song ripples
down the shaft of air heralding dawn.
Open-eyed now, I watch light seeping from
the boulder my head rests upon. I see
a single stem of long bark, a slender trunk
no bigger than my wrist taken root
in the rock itself. I enter slow struggle,
tendril by tendril, sense the swelling of
narrow fingers, feel them thrusting,
half inch by quarter inch, spreading a web,
thickening core, dissolving stone to
centennial soil, lifting a final feathery
green frond to its quota of breath at last,
pointing upward fierce and straight –
becoming full partner to the rock.
“The Tamarisk Tree,” Shirley Windward, from Passager’s 2011 Poetry Contest Issue.
Sometimes trees are objects of beauty; sometimes they’re functional—shade, fruit, erosion control—that kind of thing. And sometimes, they’re just in the way of human progress. Here’s Gilbert Arzola’s poem “The Thinking Tree.”
They cut down her tree to let
electricity pass.
Four feet from the line that divided
what was mine from
what was theirs.
The tree intended no harm and
made no argument.
It played no part
where to grow,
where roots should spread.
All of that was fate
and fate again
that drew the saw
until there was no sign
of where the tree had stood
or of the girl that had sat
beneath it.
“The Thinking Tree,” Gilbert Arzola, from his book Prayers of Little Consequence.
We started this edition of Burning Bright talking about Joyce Kilmer and his poem “Trees.” The poem’s been parodied many times. Perhaps the most famous was this one by Ogden Nash:
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.
To buy Gil Arzola’s book Prayers of Little Consequence, subscribe to or learn more about Passager and its commitment to writers over 50, go to passagerbooks.com. You can download Burning Bright from Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts, and various other podcast apps. Passager offers a 25% discount on the journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.
For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
