Hi Paul:
Greetings from Manhattan. At this in-between time of year, when winter slowly becomes spring, nature reveals itself in the starkest of terms. Here is the poem “Hickories,” from my 2008 collection, Father of Water.
Best wishes,
Charles Pierre
Hickory in winter. Flickr.com. Photographer unknown.
Hickories
Best to see them bare, in earliest spring,
at the end of March, when the uncertain
drift from winter shows them in bark only,
standing and branching in jets of wind
over the cold soil. At this unadorned time,
with neither snow nor foliage to hide
their rough wiry forms, they move
in routines severe yet clear, as if
ingrained in their fiber is the sense
of making do, making beauty with the least
costume and fewest movements, making do
in rhythmic turns from shade to sun,
from night to dawn, from winter to spring,
in the uncertain drift through minutes
and days and months, in space
as bare as the trees themselves, in silence
as bare as the trees themselves.
BLOSSOM DEARIE: