Perhaps it’s the end of the year and time to just dump old DOC files that I converted from WPS files which I converted from the original LotusWorks files I created in my prolific college period, but since I saw Edmund Spenser’s “One day I wrote her name upon the strand” over at Pejmanesque, I thought it only fitting to present my responses:
A Carved Tree (I)
Copyright 1991 Brian J. Noggle, you illegal poem-sharing rabble
One day I carved her name into a tree
with mine inside a Cupid-arrowed heart.
When I had closed my knife, she checked my art,
and shook her head, and then she looked at me.
“Now why’d you come and maim this oak?” asked she.
“Here in the woods, it lived its life apart,
but now the awful manly meddlings start.
This tree will never have its privacy.”
“I maimed this oak so everyone could see
our names as linked for all Eternity,
and I must admit to you, my deified,
I like our love like this, objectified,
so that it’s not another petty ‘love’,
but like a natural law passed from above.”
A Carved Tree (II)
Also Copyright 1991 Brian J. Noggle,
so don’t repost without permission, Harvey
This quiet spot, beneath this ancient oak,
is where I come to think on brooding days.
The open sky is blue and mocks the strays
that cower underneath the leafy cloak.
I sit and sip my slowly warming Coke,
and stumble through my memory, a maze
of many cul-de-sacs of yesterdays.
I remember how, beneath this tree, we spoke….
Above my head, carved by my careful hand,
the heart and letters of a “Brian and ….”
I remember once, the reckless words I said,
in love’s embrace of sweetly muddled head.
With human eyes, a truth is now revealed:
That higher laws can also be repealed.
UPDATE: This poem, and many others, are available in my 2018 collection Coffee House Memories.