The Grand Magnolia

Nearby the corner of two busy roads,
a grand and glorious Magnolia tree
survives a hostile, madman century
of wars and tossed-off preservation codes.

The long low branches reach out twenty feet
and weightlessly defy the pull of earth.
The massive trunk has thirty feet of girth;
the roots are big — ten men can have a seat.

To touch the tough, old bark connects to years
of passed-by days and nights of drifting stars,
and shows survival, strong defense with scars
from claws and hacks where denser bark appears.

In thin blue atmosphere, on earth, in space,
with dirt and moisture, tight concentric rings,
halfway eternal to most living things,
the old Magnolia perseveres in place.

The canopy of layered, dark green leaves create
a shaded, natural room on cooler ground,
where pasty, bright green lichen spread around
the roots, and mushrooms bulge and congregate.

A two-way march of ants runs out a limb
to work some mission privy to the queen.
A wounded branch forms a damp ravine,
a cache of brackish water wets the brim.

A serious woodpecker keeps a farm;
it systematically slams small holes
in level rings on tree-bark scrolls—
beginner homes for bugs who read no harm.

A woven pseudo-twig of silky chintz
constructs a perch for insects flying by.
The taut, complicit web is sheer to sky,
and spirals fine and sticky elegance.

A limb is stripped and cracked by earthly rules
of indiscriminate, uncivil gales,
and splits and twists from lightning which assails
essential, sweetly-ordered molecules.

The early years adjusted down from height
to bend from storms and much more safely view
superb, inviolate skies of naught but blue,
intend to offer cups of blossom white.

An upper limb, a twenty-footer, bold
with structured beauty time cannot rescind,
is dead white, barren in the summer wind,
and warns of future hoar and winter cold.

Two angry armies, gray and blue, found shade
for hapless soldiers with infected wounds,
when scabs for eyes on scorched-earth afternoons
saw bloody bandages by blood betrayed.

The grand Magnolia, once a gorgeous plethora
of white blooms, bows misshapen, aged,
with strong, fortuitous genes still engaged
to fend off any wild anathema.

The leaves are long with hard, dark veins,
and grow like palm fronds, juicy, islandish.
They shade cool nooks of primal genesis
for naked gushing groins, hot tropic brains.

The old Magnolia struggles fewer blooms,
but every petal, large as porcelain bowls,
contains the glare the last epiphany extols,
and offers seedlings packed in fluffy plumes.

One petal, fallen on the ground, face up,
resembles something thirsty angels use
— if busy angels thirst and blithely choose —
to sip clear water from a glistening cup.

A petal, tapped — a firm, resounding sound,
and lifted skyward overwhelms with curves,
succinct, aesthetic, past what science observes.
The finest petal withers on the ground.

A fallen petal will not last a day.
It sparkles in the leaves, tumbles like a crown,
from white to gold to yellow, and curls up brown.
The brilliant petals shrink and dust away.

When in full bloom a white Magnolia petal
is where, if luxury of shade and cool calm air
provide a peaceful place to pause and pare,
compassion and empathy will settle.

Poetry
is Speaking in Your
Own Voice