TODAY, ANOTHER UNIVERSE
by Jane Hirshfield
The arborist has determined:
senescence beetles canker
quickened by drought
but in any case
not prunable not treatable not to be propped.
And so.
The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.
The trunk where the ant.
The red squirrels’ eighty-foot playground.
The bark cambium pine-sap cluster of needles.
The Japanese patterns the ink-net.
The dapple on certain fish.
Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.
The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.
Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.
Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,
this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.
5
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2 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Contrary to other commenters, I found this to be beautiful and as deserving of being called poetry as anything that has ever been so called. Nattering over what requirements must be met for its labels is just mental masturbation.
Fine, let's not call it poetry. Let's call it painting, and bemoan the lack of brushes. Let's call it a choir and complain about the robes being words. I'd take it home and hang it in my aviary, and come let it light up my face when the natterers got too loud outside. I'd drink it with wine and starlight.
I particularly like the lack of verbs. It was jarring initially, as I assumed it was a mistake, but then I noticed I was hearing them anyway and I found it quite pleasing. Hanging all of the imagery there with no action builds up the setting for "a universe will vanish". Also, "The dapple on certain fish." Lovely.
I especially like the last part of the last (sentence? stanza?): "this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it." It's my kind of twaddle; I am invested.
We should figure out how to make this platform format things the way you want it to so you can post more non-poetry. I am curious about where you'd put the breaks in this one.
Garen
Level 2
Mar 27, 2020
0
Pretentious twaddlle in my book, I'm not sorry to say.
Petter
Level 9
Mar 23, 2020
0
@Allamanda In my book, poetry requires a meter, and preferably also a rhyme. Here's what I once wrote about it:-
POETRY ?
Using words
Which neither scan
Nor rhyme
Is prose.
Using obfuscate,
Imposing,
Posing words
Is still prose
The wordsmith who
would seek
To blind us otherwise
Is a prosaic poet.
Using words which scan
Though they do not rhyme
Is to write with skill
But the work is prose.
The lines may lilt
Upon the ear
But the lines are prose
‘Poetic Prose’.
Lines which scan
With words that rhyme
Make a work of art;
A work sublime.
True poets write
With symmetry
That, indeed,
Is Poetry.
Petter Finne
24.06.2009
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