Note: Because "How Grasp Green" is a work in progress, the provided audio differs slightly from the text. The text below is the poem's most recent iteration.
Trees I have planted: an ash,
the first, over my dead cat in Bloomington
6 years later bent and huge and full
of mocking birds. Why not when we die,
we come back as myriad-minded? 2 blossoming
pears that didn't blossom until I sold
the house on Hawthorne for less than I paid.
Melodious racket: What for? What for? All
prepositions are hopeful but opaque is
the afterlife. A tiny birch that didn't make
one March. The eye is always skyward, thus
we are bound in sheaves of light and may we
be buried in greeny earth. An expensive,
doted-on Japanese cherry--every spring
morning with miniscule clippers, I'd snip
tiny cross-branches then that long Iowa
winter girdled by starving rabbits, ripped
apart by starving deer braving the crossing
from the cemetery. Who can doubt this world's
brutality. Who questions the mercy of hidden
green back, a weeping pussy willow, 4 furs
that will grow into a living fence? And this
is how I find myself wandering a temple.
Excerpted from Bender: New & Selected Poems by Dean Young. Copyright 2012 by Dean Young. Excerpted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. 9(MDM3NjYwMjA5MDE1MjA1MzQ1NDk1N2ZmZQ004))
