Poems

Chapter 53: City Trees

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About This Book

This collection gathers lyrical poems that move between expansive meditations and concentrated sonnets, exploring awe, longing, and the burdens of compassion. Recurring subjects include nature, seasonal change, mortality, and desire, with vivid images of orchards, sea, and city life anchoring philosophical reflection. The volume alternates long narrative-lyric pieces with brief, tightly crafted songs and sonnets, shifting from exuberant, declarative lines to quiet elegiac tones. Organized in sections that vary in mood and form, the work emphasizes emotional immediacy, formal variety, and an attentive speaker negotiating self, other, and the natural world.

City Trees

The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.

And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.

Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come—
I know what sound is there.