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: