Why do I prize it? Not just for rhymes;
"Birches" returns me to my boyhood times.
I, too, swung from trees in my youthful play,
Though treetop to ground not quite in that way.
Fluid canvas of birches, heads left then right,
Greening and preening in day-glimpses bright;
White-washed trunks pale against dark bark around,
Swinging and sweeping their brooms to the ground.
That throat-closing metaphor: birch leaves become
Down-swept and sun-shot girls' hair like some
Beachside image, yet one aptly wrought,
Of a summer-land, winter-land photo he's caught.
"Frost"-crusted boughs, brush-bumping and clicking;
Deep in thought, discarding and picking
Alliteration--like ice cracked and crazed,
He showers it splendidly; entranced we've gazed
At delicate jewels of crystalline shell,
Sprinkled as shattered glass on a snow swell;
The artist daubs on, fitly fashioning phrases
For our videogram, adding visions he raises.
All blank pentameter, cadence marching true;
Before the winter, before the child grew;
The lone boy, the game without a ball,
On a farm, improvising and chancing a fall.
And like Frost himself, don't we all clutch birches,
Investing life with incessant searches
For peace and contentment and a chance to be,
In our mind at least, free to swing from a tree?
There's little that rhymes but so much to enjoy,
Going back to the birches and back to the boy.
Thank you, dear Robert, for a young piece of verse;
Than a swinger of birches, one could do much worse.
Next is "Recuerdo," about a boat ride
Of two happy people and an old head that cried;
A vignette of love through a night blonded day,
By poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay;
Boaters triply-tired and bubbly-merry,
A romantic duo on a criss-crossing ferry.
A six-foot line Edna designed and assigned,
With rhyme as tall and music refined,
Mixing mood colors like moon and fire
To quicken emotions pleasantly higher.
Rising dawn imagery so beautifully bold:
The dripping sun a brimming bucketful of gold.
And how better to pen-paint than a wan sky?
For we mortal verse-weavers can't help but try;
Some "Golden Delicious" simileing the sun
And eleven left from each for the shawled head
Before training home and testing their bed.
Too few lines span the lovers, a ferry and bay,
And a "memory" bank bricked at a quay.