Saturday, January 3, 2009

Mockingbird and the Cherry Tree




Found bit, from Mary Oliver's prose poem, West Wind #7 from her book West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems. This is the second verse:


---Today Bill tells us - for a mockingbird has begun to sing -
---how a friend came during the summer and filled a bowl with
---fruit from the cherry tree. Then, leaving the bowl on the
---stoop, he went inside to sit with Bill at the kitchen table. To-
---gether Bill and his friend watched the mockingbird come to
---the bowl, take the cherries one by one, fly back across the yard
---and drop them under the branches of the tree. When the
---bowl was empty the bird settled again in the leaves and began
---to sing vigorously.

---Mary Oliver




And darling Issa:

gate's cherry tree
all this flit-flit flitting
is work!
Issa translated by David Lanoue




best,
Don

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Delightful!
Delightful!

((both poems... re:mind
(or is it "wake up') the reader / me))


some bird
suddenly
all a-flutter
can Spring be
far behind



Ed

Anonymous said...

pee est:

that part of the Mary Oliver poem... the very "best" poetry I've ever read!

and, it gets me far beyond mere-ly calling it "poetry"
one 'reading' and I totally re:call the narrative

a lesson can be learned from Mary/Bill and this little bird! etc.

my initial (facial) re:action: a "Mona Lisa" type smile then a walk to my back-yard deck to feed the birds...



there are two cherry-trees out back in my neighbor's yard left over from when this place was fruit tree orchid...pre-1925 (or so) around her, birds, squirrels, people and rats get the fruit ...

especially the figs!
..and, this is happening r i g h t n o w
r i g h t h e r e

just as "it" is Magic!

or should I say/write:

just
as
it
is

is
adequate

Issa's Untidy Hut said...

Ed,

Yes, and suddenly this reminded me of when a friend of mine - we lived at the shore, 20 years ago, and there were fishermen at the bulkhead and one of them caught a small flounder and threw it on the ground - we waited, and he just left it there, flipping and flopping, and my friend finally fearlessly walked up and took up the fish and threw it back in the river and the guy, a big brawler type, said "hey, that's my fish" and my friend, the small poetic type, simply said "Nobody owns that fish" and that was that ...

So says the lovely mockingbird...

Don

Charles Gramlich said...

And perhaps a cherry tree grows.