The Tree is Broken

This man is tired.
There is little water
And the tree is broken.

It is not wind which blows
Exaggerating
Into the hollows of tonight,
Nor today
Distended into a stark headline,
In which a soul shrieks
While words extinguish it.

This man hopes
And that man prays
That rain might fall
Through bare branches.

It may be poetry or exuberance
Which inflates our dreams.
Who alone knows
What raises the heart above the commonplace,
Or where the still, dark place is
In which a heart will grow
Before daylight breaks it?

This man is not tired.
He is exhausted.
This man does not love
Although he bursts with passion.
He is dry with the salt of years.
And water no longer flows in him.
What grows in his veins
Is neither tree nor leaf.

© BH, 1995

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Somebody asked if onybody kent o a poem in Scots about trees. I min't on this. This is the version in Inglis that I wrote in 1995. So I rendered it Scots, an, no, nae in translation. I reimagined it. The Scots version is here.

See fit ye think…