Tree Studies

A Flowering Cactus, drawn in 2015

Poem of April 2016

What of your loves, your errant loves,
When men have loved before you?
They have already traveled that weary path,
They have already written that story.
What does it mean if there was a park
Where you glanced at her, and she glanced back,
At the back of the trees, in the gathering dark?
What of your loves when a man long dead
In an old photograph, turning his head,
Loved as you loved, a sturdy wife
That once was young and full of life?
Was there not some summer when they wrote stories
In love letters, and stopped to smell roses,
Is it not possible that pair knew
Something pure, something true?
Faded glory, the stockbroker's bride
In an old photograph, turning aside,
You can look up the dates when they lived and died.
Marrying a widow in an Anglican church,
With nosegays and posies and perfumes and such,
And a new inkwell and a Sunday hat,
What does it matter, all that?
My grandmother's fox stole,
My grandad's straw boater,
For the sad milkman
And the minister's daughter.
And they taught them to write in copperplate
And hesitate slightly at the gate,
With an opera air, and a popular song,
Battling for glory now gone.
What kind of eye did they look from but mine,
Our forebears in time?
And what makes us live, what makes us divine,
They must've been shown a similar sign,
They must've been able to read the lines
That we can read, and be resigned?
It has all been done a million times.

For they did nothing thoughtlessly!
It was for them as it is for me.

"Idiot bard! I wrote this poem,
He wrote it too, that predeceased us,
This is his kingdom and his realm
That he has leased us,
I am the first and everlasting man
That ever speaks thus".