`Words Work'

On July 1, 2000, the day my middle son was born, I planted a cherry tree in front of our house in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Nearby, for my wife, I planted a red rose. We moved to Houston in May 2004. By then, the cherry had filled out and doubled in height. The rose was scraggly but flowering. I’ve returned only once, a year after the move, and the new owners had, for some reason, cut down the automobile-sized rhododendron that grew by the front window but spared the cherry and rose. I was relieved: My atavistic mind links them to the family members for whom I planted them. I think of these things only because I read “Beech Tree,” by Patrick Kavanagh:

“I planted in February
A bronze-leafed beech
In the chill brown soil
I spread out its silken fibres.

“Protected it from the goats
With wire netting
And fixed it firm against
The worrying wind.

“Now it is safe, I said,
April must stir
My precious baby
To greenful loveliness.

It is August now, I have hoped
But I hope no more –
My beech tree will never hide sparrows
From hungry hawks.”

On the same afternoon I read Kavanagh’s poem, I read an interview with the Canadian poet Carmine Starnino. I’ve ordered several of his books, based on what he says in the Northern Poetry Review interview, including this:

“Forgive me for saying this, but I'm tired of all the defeatist talk about poetry. It's really trendy to mourn about the various ways in which experience defeats language….More interesting to me than what form can't do is what it can -- and has -- done. Words work. That is, they make us cry, laugh. Words can alter ideas, stop them, or mint new ones.”

I admire the hopefulness and blunt common sense of “Words work,” a truth well known to common readers, if not critics. I neither cried nor laughed after reading “Beech Tree,” nor do I claim it’s a great poem. It touched me in a pre-critical way, and moved me to think about a part of my emotional landscape – anxiety over my kids in a world of “hungry hawks” – I ignore most of the time. Words, you see, work.