"Adirolf"

Before you read this entry, I would like you to read the previous one, especially the last section. It can shed some light on this poem.

adirolF
By: (HurricaneTeen)

A gravel road
cut out of swamp and pine
winds through the memories
of my mind.
My thoughts wind down
this road of memories,
taking me back
to that family of mine.

We lived humbly
among the
cows and swine.
We ate a few gophers,
and a gator
from time to time.
Old folks sat
in rocking chairs,
waving as I
passed them by.
I loved them all dearly,
and I considered them
mine.

Our house was
built of cypress,
and our spirit of
heartwood pine.
But our life was
soon to unravel,
like a spool
of cotton twine.

That gravel road
is a highway,
and the pine exists
nevermore.
The rocking chairs
sit empty,
and the people crave
more and more.

I do not recognize
this place
without the hammocks
of palm and oak.
The gophers were
buried and suffocated,
and the land
covered with houses
like a cloak.

Our swamps now sit empty,
The panthers no longer run free.
Our river is choked with toxins,
And shredded are the backs
Of the manatee.

Our culture is dying,
Our Southern flag
No longer can we see.
Our house now sits empty,
No old folks left
To wave at me.

Oh!
How the heart aches
Inside of me!

Take me back
to my road of memories!
Take me away
from this place!
My people are gone,
but not forgotten.
The extermination
of a race.

Wow...Amazing parallels...

The Old Elm Tree by the River
By: Wendell Berry

Shrugging in the flight of its leaves,
it is dying. Death is slowly
standing up in its trunk and branches
like a camouflaged hunter. In the night
I am wakened by one of its branches
crashing down, heavy as a wall, and then
lie sleepless, the world changed.
That is a life I know the country by.
Mine is a life I know the country by.
Willing to live and die, we stand here,
timely and at home, neighborly as two men.
Our place is changing in us as we stand,
and we hold up the weight that will bring us down.
In us the land enacts its history.
When we stood it was beneath us, and was
the strength by which we held to it
and stood, the daylight over it
a mighty blessing we cannot bear for long.

The Dream

By: Wendell Berry

I dream and inescapable dream
in which I take away from the country
the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,
ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,
our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.

I restore then the wide-branching trees.
I see growing over the land and shading it
the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.
I am aware of the rattling of their branches,
the lichened channels of their bark, the saps
of the ground flowing upward to their darkness.
Like the afterimage of a light that only by not
looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.
All its beings belong wholly to it. They flourish
in dying as in being born. It is the life of its deaths.

I must end, always, by replacing
our beginning there, ourselves and our blades,
the flowing in of history, putting back what I took away,
trying always with the same pain of foreknowledge
to build all that we have built, but destroy nothing.

My hands weakening, I feel on all sides blindness
growing in the land on its peering bulbous stalks.
I see that my mind is not good enough.
I see that I am eager to own the earth and to own men.
I find in my mouth a bitter taste of money,
a gaping syllable I can neither swallow nor spit out.
I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all
that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever.

Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?

Letter to a Yankee (NO comments on the title allowed :-D)

To whom it may concern,

Blood runs through your hands
as money runs to you.
The stain of a million beings,
of a land once living,
enshrouds you soul.

You come for what's here
and change what you see,
and don't care 'bout a poor
cracker boy like me.

You tell us what to do,
you tell us what to say,
and we let you;
that's just our way.

We respect who you are,
we accept what you want,
and you thank us by
ripping out our Heart.

We don't mind you coming
here,
we love to share the joy,
just leave us to our ways,
and listen to a boy.

Sincerely,
A Pissed-off Floridian

My Own Poetry...

I have posted a couple Wendell Berry poems on here lately, and there is even more to come in the future. However, I wanted to share one with you that I wrote at around 2 in the morning, during one of those nights when I just couldn't fall asleep due to my continuous thoughts of Florida. My "Uncle" Stuart put it very well when he told Coastal Living, "I've laid in my bed at night and literally cried at the devastation." Those of you with Florida coarsing through your veins know what we are talking about. Anyway, I am usually apprehensive about sharing poetry, especially works like this that sound like what my generation calls "emo." Nonetheless, I want to share this one with you, and I may decide to post more. We'll see :-D.

An Untitled Poem
By: HurricaneTeen

O what this tree
has been through
over the years
of its life.
From age to age
it's had little
to weather.

But the termites
have crept into
its sprawling limbs.
It is torn,
not fallen,
but falling.

And every limb
felled from its
majestic trunk
is a limb
torn from ours,
never to be
replaced.

The destruction
is wrought
before our very eyes,
but we are blind.
The termites work
within the tree,
while we plunge
our heads into the sand.

They feed off
off of the tree,
and they feed off of us;
feed off our ignorance.
We allow them to eat
our bodies and souls.

We look to the Lord
with a heart
aching, seeking
to find what is lost,
in futility,
and our souls
will never again
be complete.

Dark With Power

By Wendell Berry


Dark with power, we remain
the invaders of our land, leaving
deserts where forests were,
scars where there were hills.

On the mountains, on the rivers,
on the cities, on the farmlands
we lay weighted hands, our breath
potent with the death of all things.

Pray to us, farmers and villagers
of Vietnam. Pray to us, mothers
and children of helpless countries.
Ask for nothing.

We are carried in the belly
of what we have become
toward the shambles of our triumph,
far from the quiet houses.

Fed with dying, we gaze
on our might's monuments of fire.
The world dangles from us
While we gaze.

The Porch over the River

My English teacher lent me a book of poetry by Wendell Berry today, and over the next week or so, you can expect daily posts of poems I find outstanding. So, here is the first, and they will progressively get better until we reach my favorite.

In the dust of the river, the wind
gone, the trees grow still--
the beautiful poise of lightness,
the heavy world pushing toward it.

Beyond, on the face of the water,
lies the reflection of another tree,
inverted, pulsing with the short strokes
of waves the wind has stopped driving.

In a time when men no longer
can imagine the lives of their sons
this is still the world--
the world of my time, the grind

of engines marking the country
like an audible map, the high dark
marked by the flight of me,
light stranger than stars.

The phoebes cross and re-cross
the openings, alert
for what may still be earned
from the light. The whippoorwills

begin, and the frogs. And the dark
falls, again, as it must.
The look of the world withdraws
into the vein of memory.

The mirrored tree, darkening, stirs
with the water's inward life. What has
made it so?--a quietness in it
no question can be asked in.