This is a poem from my time at the Banff Centre, when I spent long hours looking out my window, up the slopes of mountains, the tree-covered slopes, the almost entirely coniferous-covered slopes, broken only occasionally by the brief flames of yellow aspens. Fortunately, they were autumn flames, not forest fires, but it got me thinking about fire and out came this poem:

First Version:

Letting a Forest Be

Each pinecone places walls around seeds,
allows wind into each tiny lung
as paper grows, shapes
fans to fly with, fans
to flame in dry times, allow
life to reinvent
berries red among
black husks. We want to stop
each towering height of crackling
Shiva breathes onto green
spare the burnt backs
of rabbits slowed
by love’s teeth, hold our view
of beauty against
the backdrop life paints
over every time she looks
our way. We can’t
though we fly water through blue
sky and are always too late.

The first time Don saw this poem he said it was too short. That I had truncated my ending. I also hadn’t done my homework, I realized, when I went back to work on it. I’m an avid researcher and I like all facts to be right in a poem. So I looked up pinecones just to doublecheck and found out that only female pinecones produce seeds (duh) and only after they’ve been fertilized by the male cone’s pollen.

After correcting the facts and extending the poem, I also played with the line lengths. First I tried it in a longer length, to see how that sounded:

Letting a Forest Be

The mating of pinecones places walls around
seeds, slides wind into lungs so paper thickens, shapes
fans to fly with, fans to flame in dry times, allow
new berries to pop red among black husks. We want to stop
each towering height of crackling Shiva breathes
onto green, spare the burnt tails of rabbits slowed
by love’s teeth, hold our view of beauty against
the backdrop life paints over every time she looks
our way. Feeling the anxiety of birch in a tight
field, we cut the deepness of ditches through
the homes of worms to save our own, forgetting
the passion of bushes, forgetting how needles knit
a forest floor into a casket flowers bloom from.
Birds flit at the first crackle, listening for the marathon
animals run by heart. Though we fly water through blue
skies, we are always too late. Nature burns.

This doesn’t work for me. I find line lengths need to be dictated by the mood of the poem and by its movement. I’ve been writing much longer lines lately, but that’s because I’ve been writing more reflective, more elegiac poems. I have wanted, in those poems, to keep the reader moving slowly through each line.

This poem is different. It’s about forest fires. They flame fast once they get started and the poem has to reflect that speed, it has to drag the readers’ eyes down, down, down.

So here’s the line lengths I went with:

Final Version:

Letting a Forest Be

The mating of pinecones places
walls around seeds, slides wind
into lungs so paper thickens, shapes
fans to fly with, fans
to flame in dry times, allow
new berries to pop red among
black husks. We want to stop
each towering height of crackling
Shiva breathes onto green, spare
the burnt tails of rabbits slowed
by love’s teeth, hold our view
of beauty against the backdrop life
paints over every time she looks
our way. Feeling the anxiety
of birch in a tight-knit field, we cut
the deepness of ditches through
the homes of worms to save
our own, forgetting
the passion of bushes, forgetting
how needles knit a forest floor
into a casket flowers bloom
from.  Birds flit at the first
crackle, listening for the marathon
animals run by heart. Though we fly
water through blue skies,
we are always too late. Nature burns.