Your Wednesday Poetry

What sort of English teacher would I be (for those of you who don't know, I contract teach writing for our local university) if I didn't occasionally improve your minds with some poetry, as well as the occasional thought-provoking quote? Besides, it's an homage to LadyEloise, who first taught me to really appreciate and analyze such things (she was my high school English teacher ... and, actually, the same for several other blog readers! Yes, it's a small town). This poem was in the newspaper this Sunday, and it seemed awfully topical for this blog, beyond the fact that I just liked it.

The Cherry Tree
by David Wagoner (University of Washington professor)
from Crazyhorse, No. 73, Spring 2008

Out of the nursery and into the
garden
where it rooted and survived its
first hard winter,
then a few years of freedom while
it blossomed,
put out its first tentative branches,
withstood
the insects and the poisons for insects,
developed strange ideas about its height
and suffered the pruning of its
quirks and clutters,
its self-indulgent thrusts
and the infighting of stems at
cross purposes
year after year. Each April it forgot
why it couldn't do what it had to
do,
and always after blossoms, fruit,
and leaf-fall,
was shown once more what
simply couldn't happen.
Its oldest branches now, the
survivors carved
by knife blades, rain, and wind, are
sending shoots
straight up, blood red, into the
light again.