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One Autumn Day in the Far North Country, under a cherry tree
our poet finds a new way of looking at things
"It is Autumn and the fire of red maples
Rampages along the mountain slopes" so our
Love-lorn poet records, for a while
Losing his own troubles in finding words,
His shoes scuffling the sodden leaves
Blown out from a cherry tree, bare-limbed
With only the tatters of a green canopy.
He searches fiercely for the words
For how discarded and frail we all might
Feel, his eyes acutely tuned, settle
On one black branch coming to a trident
Delineated on the sky's blank paper,
Three prongs inscribing - it now comes to him -
The ideograph for yama (mountain).
Is the tree describing by representation
What is immense and outside itself,
And by doing so, to tame it to its size,
Or, he ponders, was it less of a statement
More a tribute, a worship, a message
To neighbouring trees or all those who could
Read it; he is thinking like a tree himself.
He is half out of the world of men,
His eyes, wide-open, the icons of the splayed
Branches prickling into them, hundreds,
Crying out a warning, yama yama,
Or then, softer, yama, yama, pleading,
Plaintive, yama, hear me, yama, yama,
Unyielding mountain, distant and aloof.
He shrinks the tree to a seed, a seed
That roots out into the dark soil drawing
In nutrients, spreading out further, and how
Then, he imagines, the shoots lifting to light,
Copying in the air the configurations in the soil,
Thickening into the firm trunk, the branches,
And come the spring, the poems, the blossoms.
He wants then the self-expression of such a tree;
See our poet scribbling, trying to find
Words as shockingly pure and white
As the petals of the cherry blossom, their
Groups on the bough, the clouds in the tree
And then the laden trees spreading southward,
As the earth warms, to cover the whole island.
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