Yew Trees

Today we cut back the yew trees in front of our house. Roethke’s poem is about cuttings struggling to put down roots…these trees are beginning a struggle back upward. This poem resonates, nonetheless…

Cuttings by Theodore Roethke

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it —
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.