Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO A FALLEN WALNUT TREE, by LYNNE MCMAHON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO A FALLEN WALNUT TREE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: In the columbia tribune a mere paragraph
Subject(s): Trees


In the Columbia Tribune a mere paragraph
that this August storm took off a roof and
blew a doghouse through a chain-link fence,
the Weimaraner inside intact, though skittish
now, it seems, at back-porch chimes (the owners
vow to take them down, replace them
with hollow copper bells, whose clapperlessness
appeals to us as well, as the form
of meaning, if not the sound), but not a word
regarding you, our fallen walnut tree,
whose catastrophe included ours:
hit dead center on our vegetable plot, you got
tomatillos and tomato plants and two
cucumbers and half the terraced climbing things,
and covering everything else
with your outflung arms, which broke
the heaviest trunk-weight fall, gave all the other
plants a daylong shade.
Well, one might say, this hardly rates
a poem. Trees fall. Blossoms blacken.
I don't intend a message here, or spiritual
aside. What druidical rites the fireflies
invoke for the light-winged dryads of the trees
are invisible to me, though I've read the lore.
It's more that I was a novice at gardening
and was, perhaps, too precious in my expertise.
Too early proud, I confront the harvest now
in narrower terms. The wood will burn,
the stump remain, and I, for all my self-conscious
apostrophizing, will have learned
something by your fall.
Cleverness will not keep the tree upright
or calm the frightened dog.







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