Poem of the Week, by Seán Hewitt
Yesterday we walked past four men in yellow safety vests standing silently in a south Minneapolis front yard, gazing up at the limbs of an enormous oak next to an old frame house. One limb drooped close to the roof. It was a brilliant fall day, maple and oak leaves twirling to the ground in red and yellow, and maybe because I’m in love with trees or maybe because I’m me I said to the Painter Those men look like they’re having a prayer meeting for the tree.
The Painter, who used to work for a tree pruning company, explained they were trying to figure out how high to climb, where to make the cuts, calculating which way the limbs would swing on their way down to the ground, how to both keep the tree alive and the house safe.
Which also feels like a kind of prayer.
Leaf, by Seán Hewitt
For woods are forms of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak
with the weight of it.
For each tree is an altar to time.
For the oak, whose every knot
guards a hushed cymbal of water.
For how the silver water holds
the heavens in its eye.
For the axletree of heaven
and the sleeping coil of wind
and the moon keeping watch.
For how each leaf traps light as it falls.
For even in the nighttime of life
it is worth living, just to hold it.
Click here for more information about poet and novelist Seán Hewitt. Today’s poem is from his collection Tongues of Fire, published in 2020 by Jonathan Cape Press.
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