Editor’s note: We’re proud to be featuring Michael Lind’s work at Liberty Island. This is the fifth of eight poems.
(In memory of Peter Viereck)
The twin oaks meshing by the mall
seem hardly to have changed at all
in thirty years. When I was small
I hummed and played
inside the dusk at noon this tall
consortium made.
Though half my life has steamed away,
these trees have lost only a day.
When I am brittle with decay,
these beings will
be firm. Amid us flickers, they
alone are still.
Soon now, my flesh like bark will flow
in knots, my hand will be a row
of roots, my spine will rot. Yet no
tree-life will be
my compensation, when I grow
into a tree.
***
Photo by VanVangelis (Pixabay)
Michael Lind is the author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction and poetry, including The New Class War and Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. His narrative poem The Alamo was named one of the best books of the year in 1997 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Bluebonnet Girl, his children’s book in verse illustrated by Kate Kiesler, won an Oppenheim Toy Portfolio prize. He has been an editor or staff writer at The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic and The National Interest and is a columnist for Tablet and Project Syndicate and a fellow at New America, a nonpartisan think tank he co-founded in 1999. A fifth generation native of Austin, Texas, Lind has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
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