Poem: "London Trees" · Tue Dec 15, 05:02 AM

I signed up for NaNoWriMo again this year — my third time — and as before, I did not finish. However, this is the first time I felt that I quit for a good reason. I had a plot outline constructed, and characters, and scenes, and my writing was clicking along quite well (averaging about 2000 words/hour, give or take). A few days into the month, though, I realized something: the writing of my novel had transformed from an exercise in writing the novel itself into an exercise in writing — in terrific detail — about all of the art I would rather have been doing instead of writing. I decided that it would be a much more productive, not to mention enjoyable, use of my time to actually just do the art I was really wanting to do, instead of writing about the doing of that art.
Anyway, the title of the novel I had started working on, “For Our Own Destruction Weep,” was taken from a poem by Kathleen Raine. Here is that poem (you can find it, along with many other excellent works, in Kathleen Raine’s Collected Poems, available at Amazon and other sources).

London Trees

Out of the roads of London springs the forest,
Over and underworld, the veritable Eden
Here we have planted for our solitude,
Those planes, where thoughts unblamed among the leaves may run.

Sensing us, the trees tremble in their sleep,
The living leaves recoil before our fires.
Baring to us war-charred and broken branches,
And seeing theirs, we for our own destruction weep.

And women, sore at heart, trying to pray
Unravel the young buds with anxious fingers
Searching for God, who has gone far away,
Yet still at evening in the green world lingers.

Obedient still the toiling trees
Lift up their fountains, where still waters rise
Upwards into life, filled from the surrounding skies
To quench the sorrows thirsting in the world’s eyes.

— Kathleen Raine

-- David --

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