Under the shady roof
Of branching elm star-proof.

A song to the oak, the brave old oak, Who hath ruled in the greenwood long!

And elm-trees, massed like ostrich feather plumes,
Are streaked and shot with fire.

Under oak, ash and thorn My soul was born. Under thorn, oak and ash My body bent to the lash.

Storms make oaks take deeper root.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.

Landscape

Isn't it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about

spiritual patience? Isn't it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning, so far, I'm alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky — as though

all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.

6319.
Little Stroaks
Fell great Oaks.