National Poem in Your Pocket Day

Yesterday morning as I was drawing out the last of the Mr. Bear embroidery blocks, I heard this story on NPR.  Here's is the link so you can listen for yourself.  (It's short.)

Yes, actually, that is me with my radio.  (I told you I'm from the 14th Century.)  It seems today is National Poem in your Pocket Day and so it seems only fitting that I should share a poem from my pocket with you.

There were many good teachers in my educational background, including Mrs. Judy Kern, my 9th grade speech and drama teacher, who turned me into a poetry lover with her wonderful talent for reading poems aloud.  She introduced me and the rest of my class to some fabulous poets and poems and kept us spellbound with her dramatic interpretations read aloud.  For that, Mrs. Kern, I salute you wherever you are.  Thank you for being my teacher so many years ago. . . even if you did make me write 100 times "I will not chew gum or eat other candy in Mrs. Kern's drama class ever again."  (I got the "or eat other candy" part of that sentence for protesting that I wasn't chewing gum, but eating candy.)

As I sat doing my embroidery yesterday morning, I considered my favorite poems and finally settled on "Birches", by Robert Frost, who remains one of my favorite poets.  While there are many others including Ogden Nash, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Kahlil Gibran, Omar Khayyam, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg (and all the other ones I'm leaving out), I chose "Birches" for the picture it paints in my mind and for the way it, amazingly, fills all of my senses despite being in just two dimensions on the printed page.  I hope you enjoy it too.

Birches

BY ROBERT FROST

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay

As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father's trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig's having lashed across it open.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:

I don't know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Source: The Poetry of Robert Frost (1969)