Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE BURNING BEECH, by MIMS THORNBURGH WORKMAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE BURNING BEECH, by                    
First Line: Four-thirty it was. He says he can remember
Last Line: "that day in arkansas among the pine."
Subject(s): Beech Trees; Fire; Trees


Four-thirty it was. He says he can remember
He looked at his watch as he left the white sand road
And entered the woods that day in late September,
Half conscious of his gun. Some ghost or goad,
As old as the earliest human ever to pause
At the edge of an unknown forest ere he strode,
A stranger, into its mysteries and its laws,
So harried him, hurried him in its ghostly mode.

He had no mind to squirrel, though some were there;
So when one ran he watched it motionless
And wondered, not how far he hides and where,
But, why do these wan forewarnings prick and press?
While things like these took form in thought, not speech --
A tangled twine of whither. whence and why --
Sudden he saw -- he saw the burning beech!

Brilliantly it blazed, all gold from earth to sky,
Each leaf at such an angle to the sun,
While the sun itself leaned such a level way
That not one small green leaf shone green, not one,
To dim the splendor of that rare array.
It was a living thing! He scarce could breathe.
He stood like stone. He stayed, he thought, a year.

That was a year ago. "Now let life seethe
Or soothe," he writes, "Come faith or come what fear!
One thing I have, one thing I know is mine --
That day in Arkansas among the pine."





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