The White Leaves
I stand wounded,
at the feet
of my tree;
my sycamore.
Given to me as a sapling,
I buried it deep in the backyard,
us growing together like brothers,
but it out grew me.
As a child,
I suckled on its branches;
my ghost tree.
Now,
its crown touches the clouds,
as thick as a man,
wood rotting,
with white leaves.
So ax against the trunk,
I begin to cut it down,
so ax against its chest,
I ram it over and over again.
As I shatter it,
I repeat what my girl once told me:
“I cut myself out of love,
I cut myself to be heard.”
And now I think I understand her.
I’ll build it into something else,
like the hull of a ship,
one hundred oars with one hundred men,
the ocean underneath,
as we drift from here to there.
I really liked this one, just found the last verse a bit weak if you don’t mind my input. But good to see you are still going. I’m watching it all unfold.
Jim
Hey Jim – no, definitely thank you for the feedback –
I was actually feeling the same thing as I reread it one last time but think i got lazy – are you talking about just ‘as we drift from here to there.’ or those last five lines?
I felt like the poem as a whole was about using the pain, real or imagined to let us know we exist, and the images in the last 5 lines seem to break from that, and the drifting bit is just that, a bit of a drift. Try maybe for something solid, my mind sees a door or a gate, an entry or exit into another life or idea? But like I said, I thought the rest was really good.
Jim
Thanks Jim – I felt something was wrong but you’ve articulated it for me – I’ll let it percolate a bit in my head to see if I can find something more truthful. I really felt like I got somewhere with this one and then it just kind of tapered into something more generic towards the end.
If I end making a revision I’ll forward it to you –
Thanks again -
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