A year before she died, my poet friend, Kathy Mitchell, won first place in a Virginia poetry competition for the poem featured in today’s post. She wrote it following a break-up with her then male companion.
Let’s Be Trees
Kathy Mitchell
I lift these logs
place them near the wood
stove and I remember your hands
against grey bark, stacking my wood
carefully one day in a casual autumn
air. We barely knew each other.
See, it is not us
but the space between
us that has changed – an atmosphere
and it has grown heavy. My paradox:
we lose when we align like logs, piled
heavy, reconfigured as for some purpose.
And now, watching
my hands grip, wield
this weight to warm my home, I long
for a springtime to turn us leafy again
lift our eyes, spread us across the sky
again, touching only at our delicate twigs
the highest reaches
of our selves flowing
glorious in motion, giving a voice
to the winds, as once we did when we knew
the useless beauty of trees. But bent
over this firewood I hear only the senseless
Knocking of oak on oak
grieve that we must destroy
then re-make ourselves to survive. And
I so love the fire. But its fuel is dead
dry, uniform and silent. I want to go up
in a green blaze. Oh, let’s be trees again.
PHOTOS: TOP: Carol Simon Shuddleston, photographer, gifted to me by my beloved Kelsey, on my 55th birthday BOTTOM: Photo atop my home altar that I took of Kathy at my holiday party, December 1999. She died on December 5, 2000.
(Below Kathy is my beloved Beth, and her son, Peter, the day he returned from Iraq. The bowl belonged to Agnes, the late mother of my beloved Charlotte. It is filled with found objects from my mother as well as ones I found while on walks in nearby woods and the ocean. The small hand-made heart was sent to me on Valentine’s Day 2013 by my beloved Bob, who died of a massive stroke six months later. To the right of the bowl is my Post-it prayer box, filled with prayer requests from beloveds. The porcelain angel sat on top of my dresser when I lived in my mother’s home.)
This poem has more meaning for me now than it did 19 years ago.
The wisdom of more losses, always more losses.
A couple more items in my altar photo that I did not identify:
Beyond the Buddhist singing bowl is a photo of my matron saint, Flannery O’Connor taken on the front porch of her mother’s home. To her right and our left is one of her dozens of beloved peacocks. The mug is a cherished handmade mug gifted to me by a now-estranged beloved. Inside the mug is a Native American flute gifted to me by my blood sister, Dawna Joy. Beneath the bowl is the envelope that contained a prayer book I received last week from the woman who, in Christian parlance, “led me to the Lord.” The prayer book belonged to her when she was a child. We are estranged because of my life relationship with Adrienne. Every once in a while she sends me objects like these. I’m too hurt to believe these gifts are out of benevolence and not out of a conviction that I need to be reminded of the will of God. The prayer book is now on a pile of other poetry books in my small writing room. Placing the envelope underneath Agnes’ bowl on the altar is my helpless way of praying for her.
As Kathy wrote in the last stanza of her poem:
“But its fuel is dead/dry, uniform and silent.”
Thank you for sharing. Beautiful.
Kathy’s poem is poignant in so many ways. “I long for a springtime to turn us leafy again lift our eyes, spread us across the sky again, touching only at our delicate twigs…..” I wonder if this is what heaven is like. I wonder if Kathy knows this springtime now. I’d like to think she does.