This time he was not there –Hat tip: Eric Thomson.
the old tree that always stood to attention,
like a guard at the door to my house.
His worn leathery trunk
weather-beaten life
wrinkled rough upright shabby,
branch like a rifle,
hat of leafy flowers,
rugged boots on feet,
creaking coarse courage
In sun in rain
in rain in cold
untiringly alert
in khaki fatigues
He'd accost from afar, "Who goes there?"
"A friend," I'd answer
and sit down for a moment
under his benign shade.
In fact, there always lurked in our ways
the mortal fear of some common foe –
the house had to be saved from thieves
the city from plunderers
the nation from its enemies
had to be saved –
river from becoming drain
air from becoming smoke
food from becoming poison
jungles from becoming deserts
humans from becoming jungles.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, April 22, 2015
The Killing of a Tree
Kunwar Narain, "The Killing of a Tree," No Other World: Selected Poems, tr. Apurva Narain (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2008), p. 159: