Category Archives: poem

"Living Tree" by Robert Morgan

LOVED this poem. Enjoy my friends! And your mission today: pass on the joy of poetry to one other person. Let’s start a movement!

American Life in Poetry: Column 418
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Robert Morgan, who lives in Ithaca, New York, has long been one of my favorite American poets. He’s also a fine novelist and, recently, the biographer of Daniel Boone. His poems are often about customs and folklore, and this one is a good example.

Living Tree

It’s said they planted trees by graves
to soak up spirits of the dead
through roots into the growing wood.
The favorite in the burial yards
I knew was common juniper.
One could do worse than pass into
such a species. I like to think
that when I’m gone the chemicals
and yes the spirit that was me
might be searched out by subtle roots
and raised with sap through capillaries
into an upright, fragrant trunk,
and aromatic twigs and bark,
through needles bright as hoarfrost to
the sunlight for a century
or more, in wood repelling rot
and standing tall with monuments
and statues there on the far hill,
erect as truth, a testimony,
in ground that’s dignified by loss,
around a melancholy tree
that’s pointing toward infinity.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2012 by Robert Morgan, whose most recent book of poems is Terroir, Penguin Poets, 2011. Poem reprinted from The Georgia Review, Spring 2012, by permission of Robert Morgan and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Age 92

Age 92

92 and you
Bruise so fast, when catching
Your wife who
Dizzy and falling, desperately needed you.
And you were there.

You were there
During world wars,
During depression,
During the birth of two boys and one daughter,
Then seven grandchildren, now six, the
Loss imprinted
On the lines of your face.

This week is 92,
But you say, 38 ½ years have gone by
In a joke that is at least
Twice my age.

twice my age

Shaded eyes
soulful,
under hot lights and sweating.

There, in the midst of Zeppelin blues and the crowd,
the ageless anticipation, the complicated thought of:
Screams from bodies trembling, hear those
soft six string moans,
microphone inhales and stifled words,
fevered hands grasping air
harmonica in crescendo
until the volume is unbearable, consumed.

We are so far; I know nothing of him.
We are so close; I see him there
leaning darkly beside the stairs.

[written when i was 20. revised here]