You can scorch it, strip it, tear it down,
Wither it with caustic sprays, call it
Rampant and invasive, or resort

To more emotional descriptors
Such as vicious, invoke
Pathetic fallacy – ‘It chokes’; still,

I like the brier.
All the eaves and complications.

I like how green the grey
Oak trunk grows in its sleeve, how
It insinuates its weave against the sun,

How furtively it fruits in summer –
Turquoise beads among the curling spaces,
Deepening to wine.

I even like the lances –
Runic, every one –
Imprinting oaths across my skin:

I promise always to be contrary,
Creviced;

I promise to be arch, to inch
Among the disregarded –
Chitin, husk, and skull;

And finally, I promise to remain,
To hide and cackle in the great dark,
Fiercely inextricable.

SARAH HANNAH was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize in the US and was a semi-finalist in the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2002. Her first collection, Longing Distance, was published by Tupelo Press in 2004. Her second, Inflorescence, is due later this year. She died in June.

© Copyright of this poem remains with the poet: please do not download or republish without permission.

top ^