WEBVTT

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Well, so much for Sylvia.

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And the other poem that
I was asked to read,

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which I'll read next is--

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it has one link with
the Soviet poems.

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And that is it is a projection
into the life of another,

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in this case into
the life of a tree.

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Just have to get a handkerchief.

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[INAUDIBLE CHATTER]
I'm not drinking soup.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Good soup, mind you.

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Good soup but-- so this
poem which I'm about to read

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is spoken by a tree.

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A tree who encountered Orpheus.

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And you know that
Orpheus, as well as

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enchanting men and animals, also
caused trees and other plants

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to follow him.

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White dawn.

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Stillness.

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When the rippling
began, I took it

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for sea wind coming
to our valley

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with rumors of salt
of treeless horizons.

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But the white fog didn't stir.

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The leaves of my brothers
remained outstretched,

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unmoving, yet the
rippling drew nearer

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and then my own
outermost branches

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began to tingle
almost as if fire

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had been lit below
them too close

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and their twig tips
were drying and curling.

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Yet I was not afraid,
only deeply alert.

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I was the first to see him for
I grew out on the pasture slope

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beyond the forest.

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He was a man, it seemed,
the two moving stems

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the short trunk, the two
arm branches flexible,

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each with five leafless
twigs at their ends.

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And the head that's crowned
by brown or gold grass bearing

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a face not like the
beaked face of a bird,

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more like a flower's.

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He carried a burden made
of some cut branch bent

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while it was green, strands of a
vine tight stretched across it.

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From this when he touched
it and from his voice which

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unlike the wind's voice had no
need of our leaves and branches

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to complete its sound
came the ripple.

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But it was now no
longer a ripple

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he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow,

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it was a wave that
bathed me as if rain

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rose from below and around
me instead of falling.

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And what I felt was no
longer a dry tingling.

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I seemed to be
singing as he sang.

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I seemed to know
what the lark knows.

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All my sap was mounting towards
the sun that by now had risen.

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The mist was rising,
the grass was

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drying yet my roots felt music
moisten them deep under Earth.

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He came still closer, leaned
on my trunk, the bark thrilled

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like a leaf still-folded.

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Music.

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There was no twig of me not
trembling with joy and fear.

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Then as he sang it was no
longer sounds only that made

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the music, he spoke and as
no tree listens, I listened,

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and language came into my
roots out of the Earth.

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Into my bark, out of the air.

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Into the pores of my greenest
shoots, gently as dew,

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and there was no word he
sang but I knew its meaning.

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He told of journeys: of where
sun and moon go while we stand

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in dark, of an Earth journey he
dreamed he would take someday,

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deeper than roots.

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He told of the dreams of
man, wars, passions, griefs,

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and I, a tree, understood words.

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Ah, it seemed my
thick bark would

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split like a sapling's that
grew too fast in the spring

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when a late frost warms it.

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Fire, he sang, the trees'
fear, and I, a tree,

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rejoiced in its flames.

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New buds broke forth from me
though it was full summer.

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As though his lyre--

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now I knew its name--

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were both frost and
fire, its chords

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flamed up to the crown of me.

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I was seed again.

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I was fern in the swamp.

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I was coal.

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And at the heart of
my wood (so close I

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was to becoming
man or a God) there

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was a kind of silence,
a kind of sickness,

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something akin to
what men call boredom.

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Something, the poem descending
a scale, a stream over stones,

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that gives to a candle
a coldness in the midst

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of its burning, he said.

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It was then when in
the blaze of his power

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that reached me and
changed me I thought

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I should fall my length, that
the singer began to leave me,

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slowly moved from my
noon shadow to open

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light, words leaping and dancing
over his shoulders back to me,

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reverie sweep of lyre tones
becoming slowly again ripple.

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And I in terror but
not in doubt of what

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I must do, in anguish, in haste,
wrenched from the Earth root

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after root, the soil
heaving and cracking,

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the moss tearing asunder.

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And behind me the others, my
brothers, forgotten since dawn.

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In the forest they too had heard
and were pulling their roots

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in pain out of a thousand
years' layers of dead leaves,

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rolling the rocks away, breaking
themselves out of their depths.

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You would have thought we would
lose the sound of the lyre,

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of the singing, so
dreadful the storm

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sounds were where
there was no storm,

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no wind but the rush
of our branches moving,

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our trunks breasting the air.

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But the music, the
music reached us.

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Clumsily, stumbling
over our own roots,

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rustling our leaves in
answer, we moved, we followed.

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All day we followed
up hill and down.

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We learned to dance.

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For he would stop where
the ground was flat

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and words he said taught
us to leap and to wind

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in and out around one another.

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In figures the lyre's
measure designed.

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The singer laughed
till he wept to see us.

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He was so glad.

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At sunset we came to
this place I stand in,

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this knoll with its ancient
grove that was bare grass then.

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In the last light of that
day, his song became farewell.

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He stilled our longing.

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He sang our sun dried
roots back into Earth,

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watered them:
all-night rain of music

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so quiet we could almost not
hear it in the moonless dark.

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By dawn he was gone.

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We have stood here since.

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In our new life we have
waited, he does not return.

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It is said he made
his Earth journey

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and lost what he sought.

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It is said they felled him and
cut up his limbs for firewood.

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And it is said his head
still sang and was swept out

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to sea singing.

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Perhaps he will not return.

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But what we have lived
comes back to us.

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We see more.

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We feel as our rings
increase, something

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that lifts our branches, that
stretches our furthest leaf

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tips further.

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The wind, the birds do not
sound poorer but clearer,

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recalling our agony and the
way we danced, the music!

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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you.