PoetryMagazine.com
Jenna Butler
CANADA
|
Jenna Butler is the author of three books of poetry, Seldom Seen
Road,
Wells, and Aphelion, and a collection of ecological essays, A
Profession of Hope: Farming at the Edge of the Grizzly Trail.
She is a farmer and a professor of creative writing and
ecocriticism at Red Deer College. |
Atalanta’s
Orchard
that first summer
not knowing better
we planted
new apple trees in the blighted orchard
runes of slender trunks lined
like some sort of witching
watched them heft
frantic crowns of green
trying to please
us
in the manner of
plants
utterly
without guile or restraint
tell me this
where the balance is found
in all we cultivate
between fortune and the jag of loss
I watched failure ride
their silver limbs
one wind on a cool day
the way bark flays open
like flesh or
hope
blossoming and blasting
white coronas almost mythic
how a blighted tree breaks in the offering
heartwood bigger than its skin
they’re slight the
things that tell you
you’re leaving a place
and you won’t return
Page 2
© Copyright, 2015, Jenna
Butler.
All Rights Reserved. |