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That holds September's weathered green

 


A few weeks ago, I learned that that the Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian's Wall was felled, in what appears to have been an act of vandalism. It is a place I've not yet visited, a beauty I will never behold. Gerard Manley Hopkins' lament over "Binsey Poplars" comes to mind: "After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. / Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve / Strokes of havoc unselve / The sweet especial scene,/ Rural scene, a rural scene, /Sweet especial rural scene."

In college, I wrote a poem about the color green that speaks of "wool that holds September's weathered green." Lion Brand makes a yarn called "forest heather" that is close to the color I envisage: green with flecks of gold and rust. I've knit a child's sweater and a fringed throw in this colorway. I will probably knit other pieces as time unwinds. I don't know if I will write another poem like this one. And now I will never see that tree, standing in its centuries-long glory along that ancient wall.  

Inspired by Natasha Clews' poem "Brown," my "Wintergreen: a ghazal" speaks of grief, love, longing, and resiliency. In 2009, it won an award and was published in Echoes of the Ozarks, volume 5, a literary journal produced by the Ozark Writers League. (I would probably call it "Evergreen" if I wrote it today; it is less about winter and green and more about the way living keeps on, even through seasons of apparent loss and dormancy.)

When something happens like the destruction of the tree at Sycamore Gap, my thoughts turn to the references to trees in Scripture: the Tree of Life in Genesis, and in Revelation the tree whose leaves will be for the healing of the nations.

The Midwest U.S. now sheds last vestiges of summer, and Goldengrove is the backdrop of my garden. 


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