![]() ![]() Maybe poetry wasn’t so unfathomable after all. And now in this snow globe of a poem, a sturdy, fearless kid, happy and not a bit psychotic, and with a bright future ahead of him, lived and relived a moment that in real life had whooshed by. I remembered one of my own boys - the one currently awaiting trial for murder - demonstrating the same sport. I felt I knew that solitary farm boy, the character Frost daydreams about, in the midst of all this nature, doing what boys always do with nature - turning it to his own purposes as he “swings” the birches, climbing their slender trunks until they bend over and return him to the ground. Their readiness to make a game out of rocks and a tin can, or a sailboat out of a leaf and a twig. I have raised three boys, and am quite attuned to the ways of boys. It was all very beautiful, but I might not have read the poem twice had it not been for the boy. Birches are natural protagonists, beloved by all (at least until one comes down in your yard). They arch in the woods, and trail their leaves on the ground. They “bend left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees.” They “click upon themselves” when coated with ice. The birches in the poem do all kinds of birchy things. And “Birches” does present an appealing surface, bright and velvety like the trees themselves. My imagination never left the realm of bark and sap. Because I wanted something solid and treelike to hang on to, my reading of “Birches” was staggeringly one-dimensional. I do love nature, though, so I followed the link to Frost. The poems were offered as an antidote to all the worrisome news about the pandemic, a reminder of “the beauty of nature and the outdoors.”Īt that point I was low enough to try anything, even read a poem - which I seldom do, because I am rather literal, and slow to take hints. To kick off the celebration, a newsletter from The Atlantic carried a link to three Robert Frost poems, including “Birches,” which the magazine first published in 1915. It was the beginning of National Poetry Month. ![]() “Birches” dropped into my life on April 1, a month after the episode, and a few weeks into the Covid-19 lockdown. What are the warning signs? Are there any? It would have been helpful to know. ![]() Maybe I should be writing about this? Should I start researching the connection between homicide and mental illness? A book on the subject could be useful, especially if it helped explain why some people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder - a tiny fraction of them - kill people. The first month after the killing, I couldn’t work or even figure out what I should be working on. “A nightmare,” friends would murmur, and that was the only word for it. Suddenly the world is a Dali painting, and familiar objects are melting onto the floor. The aftermath of a death in the family - particularly a violent death - may be the ideal time to pick up something new, like a poem, and poke it and bite into it to see if it is real. It seems odd now that I had missed this Frost classic, or failed to register it. The first time I read “Birches” was last spring, in the rawest days of a family tragedy. Only months later did I figure out what the hell he was talking about. After a horrifying incident, Robert Frost’s “Birches” was my link to the real world. A clip from my little “Birches” video based on a photo by Jill Mackie. ![]()
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