Day Nine of Writing-201: Landscape

http://khurambazurgwal.blogspot.com/2012/10/nature-beautifull-wallpaper.html

Today’s assignment required us to write about a landscape using the form of found poetry (borrowed, rearranged lines more or less) and the device enumeration. For this assignment I rearranged lines from two poems, not adding any of my own. The poems I used words/lines from were Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Song of Nature” and Ellen Bryan Voigt’s “Landscape, Dense with Trees.” Not sure how much sense it makes, but I had fun with it nonetheless. 🙂

 

Nature’s Landscape

 

When you move away, you see how much

depends on the pace of the days—

Mine are the night and morning,

the haze we waded through

each summer, visible heat, wavy and discursive.

It was partly the heat that made my father

plant so many trees.

The sunset gleams his smile.

The pits of air, two maples, the gulf of space,

two elms, the rarest flowers, mimosa by the fence,

The sportive sun, fast-growing chestnuts,

the gibbous moon, loblolly pines, the innumerable days.

 

On the farm, everything else he grew

something could eat.

Time and Thought were my surveyors,

but this would be a permanent mark

of his industry, tricked out in star and flower.

The brick house nearly swamped by leaves,

And many a thousand summers, a glade

established in the open field.

Granite, marl, and shell at the family grave

laid their courses well. Dogwood, redbud,

ornamental crab. What without him is

summer’s pomp, although he’d lost all

tolerance for heat? I travail in pain for him,

the lazy track of the snake in the dusty road.

 

Must time and tide forever run?

The country long dense promenades,

The rainbow shines, the landmark oak,

repairing recent damage by a wind.

Boreal lights leap upward. Too slow

the rainbow fades the way we

sacrificed the yards to shade.

The fresh rose on yonder thorn,

gives back the bending heavens in dew.