Apples from Shinar: A Book of Poems

BECAUSE THE RED OSIER DOGWOOD

BECAUSE THE RED OSIER DOGWOOD Because the red osier dogwood Is the winter lightning, The retention of the prime fire In the naked and forlorn season When snow is winner (For he flames quietly above the shivering mouse In the moldy tunnel, The eggs of the grasshopper awaiting metamorphosis Into the lands of hay and the times of the daisy, The snake contorted in the gravel, His brain suspended in thought Over an abyss that summer will fill with murmuring And frogs make laughable: the cricket-haunted time)I , seeing in the still red branches The stubborn, unflinching fire of that time, Will not believe the horror at the door, the snow-white worm Gnawing at the edges of the mind, The hissing tree when the sleet falls. For because the red osier dogwood Is the winter sentinel, I am certain of the return of the moth (Who was not destroyed when an August flame licked him), And the cabbage butterfly, and all the families Whom the sun fathers, in the cauldron of his mercy. [3] ...