[lit-ideas] Re: Planting A Sequoia

  • From: "Veronica Caley" <molleo1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2008 11:58:10 -0400

The poem is beautiful and very touching.  I really like the connection of 
nature between humans and trees, the latter the traditional symbol of life.

Question: what do they do for a first born daughter?

Veronica
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Julie Krueger 
  To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Saturday, October 18, 2008 11:13 AM
  Subject: [lit-ideas] Planting A Sequoia


  She reminds me (more than a little) of Sharon Olds.  Anyone familiar with 
Gioia?

  Planting a Sequoia
  by Dana Gioia

  All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
  Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
  Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
  And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
  Of an old year coming to an end.

  In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son's birth-
  An olive or a fig tree-a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
  I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father's 
  orchard,
  A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, 
  A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

  But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
  Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
  Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord,
  All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
  A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

  We will give you what we can - our labor and our soil,
  Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
  Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of
  bees.
  We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
  A slender shoot against the sunset.

  And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
  Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
  His mother's beauty ashes in the air,
  I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
  Silently keeping the secret of your birth.


  "Planting a Sequoia" by Dana Gioia from The Gods of Winter. © Graywolf Press, 
1991. Reprinted with permission.

  -- 
  Julie Krueger

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