Near The Gemstone Tree Of Poetry, She Cried

[to Edith Sitwell]

"Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?"

-Edgar Allen Poe, from Sonnet--to Science

the tepid birds have come to roost, I fear,

she murmured to the Tree of Poetry:

all shivery golden, silver in midwinter's air.

and I have dropped whole summers at your foot

as if you had died;

where little moss remains with the wild violets.

"Shoo there, shoo!" the old woman cried.

go anywhere else.

what! have you bartered for the rainbow trail?

and lowered the skies, so you could change the bulbs?

your songs belie Song.

with maidenhair with roses how could I

bind your chickweed stare.

oh love the spare, the angular,

cry critics, everywhere;

I don't know who they are.

and what they have done with you, Fair Tree-

and why the vultures winter here

when You are still alive-

pecking at your gemstone sighs each

craven prize by prize

mary angela douglas 15 june 2014

Note on the Poem: I certainly do not mean to imply that everyone who wins a prize for poetry has sold out; just that, writing for the sake of prizes rather than the sake of poetry itself is a sorrowful enterprise.