The Hawthorn

that hawthorn’s crooked faithful trunk round an old and broken growth

The Revised Edition of The House of Belonging is newly designed in a smaller travel-friendly format and contains the latest text of the poems.

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The Hawthorn

The crossed knot
in the hawthorn bark
and the stump
of the sawn off branch
hemmed by
the roughened trunk.
In that
omniscient black eye
of witness
I see the dark no-growth
of what has passed
grown round by
what has come to pass,
looking at me
as if I could speak.

So much that was
good in her,
so much in me,
cut off now
from the future
in which we
grew together.

Now
through the window
of my new house
that hawthorn’s
crooked faithful
trunk round
an old and broken
growth,
my mouth dumb
and
Dante’s voice
instead of mine
from the open book.

Brother, our love
has laid our wills to rest.
Making us long
only for what is ours
and by no other thirst
possessed.

Our life not lived
together
must still
live on apart,
longing only
for what is ours
alone,
each grow
round the missed branch
as best we can,
claim what is ours
separately,
though not forget
loved memories,
nor that life
still loved by memory,
nor the hurts
through which we
hesitantly
tried to learn
affection.

Our pilgrim journey
apart or together,
like the thirst
of everything
to find its true form,
the grain of the wood
round the hatched knot
still straightening
toward the light.


-from The House of Belonging: Revised Edition

Sometimes what we learn from a parting of ways lies in the very sadness and poignancy of the leaving itself. Once so together, now so far apart and yet still somehow forever living in an unspoken parallel: what was brought into the world somehow still alive not only in our separate lives but also in what our former togetherness bequeathed to the world... DW