Sweetgum and Cedar
       

For ages, I wanted a poem with hard
and scaly bark, a sweetgum, leaves
with sawtoothed lobes, the grain tight,
each sawed log sap-sealed and able
to grip several wedges at once, its gist
and intention beyond the human ken,
a heart hardy as rebar and dangerous to any
axe's edge. I wanted a poem so rooted
in beauty every bird in it would sing
the pure vernacular amid fruitballs exotic
and spiky as ancient weapons, wood
that burned slow from simmer to ember
and might last the night before falling to ash.

But now I need a poem more like sweet
cedar, a whim, volunteer from a seed
shat by some migrant in flight with only
weather to do the nourishing work,
the mature thing ideal for windbreak
and shelter belt, an eastern red cedar
easy to split and sliver, its timber a harbor
for the shapes and shades of flame, species
once the sole donor of heartwood
for pencils, though who now even owns
a pencil and writes by the hearth where
flames crackle and shimmer, the smoke
fragrant as a forest, say sweetgum,
say cedar, writing for life — with graphite
sleeved in its miracle of wood — this dark
sentence across the long night of words?

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Copyright © 2020 R. T. Smith All rights reserved
from Southern Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission