Classic Poem

Why do you listen, trees?
Why do you wait?
Why do you fumble at the breeze —
Gesticulate
With hopeless fluttering hands —
Stare down the vanished road beyond the gate
That now no longer stands?
Why do you wait —
Trees —
Why do you listen, trees?

(1750)

Ephraim Cross drives up the trail
From Worcester. Hepsibah goes pale
At sumach feathers in the pines.
The wooden wagon grunts and whines.
Blunt oxen leaning outward lurch
Over the boulders. Pine to birch
The hills change color. In the west
Wachusett humps a stubborn crest.
Ephraim takes the promised land,
Earth, rock and rubble, in his hand.

(1800)

Young sugar maples in a row
Flap awkward leaves. Ripe acres blow
In failing ripples to the blue
Of hemlocks. Ephraim's house stands true
Above the troubling of a brook.
Ephraim's grave stones seem to look
West of the Berkshires and still west.
Hepsibah's stones turn back compressed
And bitter silence toward the sea.
Between, her sons sleep patiently.

(1871)

A blind door yawing to the snow
Questions them in. They knock and go
Through the old bedroom to the back.
The kitchen door swings out a crack
Framing Aunt Aggie in her chair —
Dead as a haddock — ragged hair
Scrawled over on her shriveled eyes.
Since Monday morning, they surmise:
Last of her name she was, and best
Be lyin' up there with the rest.

(1923)

Plummets of moonlight thinning through
Deep fathoms of the dark renew
Moments of vision and deflect
Smooth images the eyes expect
To images the brain perceives.
Choked in a pine wood chafe the leaves
Of aged maples, but the moon
Remembers; and its shadows strewn
Sidelong and slantingly restore
Ephraim's trees about his door.

Why do you listen, trees?
Why do you wait?
Why do you fumble at the breeze —
Gesticulate
With hopeless fluttering hands —
Stare down the vanished road beyond the gate
That now no longer stands?
Why do you wait, trees?
Why do you listen, trees?