In these trees there is no ambition

 More November poems

 

"The body is like a November birch facing the full moon
And reaching into the cold heavens.
In these trees there is no ambition, no sodden body, no leaves,
Nothing but bare trunks climbing like cold fire!

My last walk in the trees has come. At dawn
I must return to the trapped fields,
To the obedient earth.
The trees shall be reaching all the winter.

It is a joy to walk in the bare woods.
The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves.
The leaves are down, and touching the soaked earth,
Giving off the odors that partridges love."

-   Robert Bly, Solitude Late at Night in the Woods 

 

"Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows,

And all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone.

I already hear the dead thuds of logs below

Falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.

 

All of winter will return to me:

derision, Hate, shuddering, horror, drudgery and vice,

And exiled, like the sun, to a polar prison,

My soul will harden into a block of red ice."

-   Charles Baudelaire, Autumn Song

 

 

 

"It's mornings like this;
The stingy sun trying to hold back
Even the warmth of its reflection
Flashing coldly In the lake.
When November leaves drop in sudden gusts,
Like a red and yellow flock of birds
Swooping at once to ground.
Or even nights:
When winds reach wet hands
To take you spinning with random paper
Down back street gutters, under straining bridges
To clogged rivers.
It's this:
The time of year, along with spring,
When poets must take care
Not to sing the same old songs
Stolen from tribal memory."

-   Thomas R. Drinkard