Monday's Poetry: "Maples"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

Tomorrow will be the first day of autumn in 2020, undoubtedly the most bizarre and harrowing year of my lifetime - and I lived through the sixties and the presidency of Richard Nixon.  The passing of seasons is one way we mark the time as we age.  Today is the close of my seventy-third summer, and I am getting to the point where I feel all of them!

But still I persist - and so must we all.

Yesterday was the birthday of the late American poet laureate, Donald Hall, and to mark that milestone Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" chose to highlight Hall's poem "Maples," and I liked it so well that I decided to reprint the poem here.  It is a piece that speaks to the changing seasons of our lives - and maples, with their fiery foliage and steady dripping of sweet syrup - are a true embodiment of autumn. 

The leaves will turn color, and drop, and the bare branches with rattle and break with the winds of winter - but spring is coming - and it will get better.

It must get better.

Maples

by Donald Hall

When I visited as a boy, too young for chores,

a pair of maples flared before the farmhouse.

My grandfather made me a swing, dangling

rope from stout branches. I hurtled

between them high as I could, pumping

out half the day while my mind daydreamed

the joy of no school, no camp, no blocks

of other children fighting childhood's wars.

With the old people I listened to radio news

of Japanese in Nanking, Madrid on fire,

Hitler's brownshirts heiling. The hurricane

of 1938 ripped down the older maple.

When I was twelve and could work the fields,
my grandfather and I, with Riley the horse,
took four days to clear the acres of hay
from the fields on both sides of the house.
With a scythe I trimmed the uncut grass
around boulders and trees, by stone walls,
and raked every blade to one of Riley's piles.
My grandfather pitched hay onto the wagon
where I climbed to load it, fitting it tight.
We left the fields behind as neat as lawns.
When I moved back to the house at forty,
a neighbor's machine took alfalfa down
in an afternoon. Next morning, engines
with huge claws grappled round green bales
onto trucks, leaving loose hay scattered
and grass standing at the field's margin.

A solitary maple still rises. Seventy years
after my grandfather hung the swing,
maple branches snap from the old tree.
I tear out dead limbs for next year's sake,
fearing the wind and ice storms of winter,
fearing broken trees, cities, and hipbones.