Thursday, August 9, 2007

Philip Larkin poem

One of the legion of readers of this blog (actually 3 people) sent in this poem. And to that person, yes I was a professor of botany at UW Madison in the 1970s.

The Trees
By Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

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