Today, if nature had been truly
sympathetic, there would have been
a driven storm and blinding rain.
Instead, there was blue sky, not much wind
and a tinnitus of crickets.
I was consumed by self-pity,
a great perverter of reality,
an egocentric wallowing,
no room for beauty.
Fortunately I stayed outside,
and little by little, the integrity of trees
erased the word self. “Oh the pity of it!”
allows compassion, welcomes beauty.
The trees had done it again,
I was healed.
*****************
I am living dangerously,
pursued by a runaway poem
which tells glaring lies.
Sure, I berated the pathetic
fallacy for being pathetic
but tree-centric as my garden is,
in the end it wasn’t the trees
themselves that made me feel better,
it was my writing a poem
about the trees making me feel better
that made me feel better.
The poem was sophisticated,
quotes Shakespeare, knows the difference
between coherence and correspondence,
is well versed in Romantic twaddle
about man and nature, but unwilling
to go out on a limb
about woman and nature.
This is a sorry case of an unreliable
narrator, but please remember
it is the poem who is the narrator.
You are faced with a choice:
which poem to beleive.
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Is this akin to the Genesis myth where Adam named the animals? Is it in the naming that we begin to relate to and understand what is happening to us, at least in part? Obviously I don't take the myth literally but there is wisdom in it.
ReplyDeleteAs for your poem, it is whimsical, witty and a challenge and I like it.
I like the idea of writing if not necessarily therapeutic, at least being able to change our thoughts and feelings through the expression of them.I find both poems very interesting and like being taken into the author's confidence and almost given a choice of what to believe as in John Fowld's 'The Lieutenant's Woman'.
ReplyDeleteI am intrigued as to what might eventuate, Diana, if you were willing 'to go out on a limb/ about woman and nature'.
Miriam