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Mark Schorr
In 1997 Mark Schorr took the
challenge to rewrite one of his poems in the spirit of Frost, and
still encourages others to take this challenge as a way of finding one's
voice.
BRUSH BURNING
Across the fields two old men walked.
I saw them clearly from where I stood:
their heads bobbing as they talked;
they wanted to burn while the burning's good;
and I knew that was why they went
through patches of field and patches of snow.
(Being a city man, I feared the intent
of these country men who think they know.)
I also knew that one was as green
as the other was full of woodsman skill.
Al had built last year, of experience lean;
El had lived there for years by force of will.
(By the figures they cut along the road
you might guess by one's jaunty gait
or by the other's lengthy stride,
that
neither was old or short of strength.)
Only El's gait hinted at on older scar--
that is why he held forth of a night
to anyone like me with an hour to kill
about the only bad years of his life--
laid up-- sometimes the story ran--
by tractor, motorbike, or plane--
being somehow removed from the scene
through varied means, ending the same.
But Al seemed fearless from where I stood:
he couldn't burn
too much--
if this daring Nature to be good
saved hours of pulling juniper brush.
And who's to say what might intervene--
for them-- and damn the danger--
when men are hell-bent on making Nature work
for them in front of any stranger.
Al first approached the friendly fire
that, sure as any friend, went its own way.
El watched the flames as they grew higher
licking dry-as-tinder brush away.
The neighbors who also burned would worry
"Better burn while snow's still there
when it starts to melt, you better hurry
or lose the only wet time 'round here."
El danced a circle around the land;
Al watched as if the means to control
the fire were not at hand--
or that was the way it seemed to go.
Now short of water and shorter of breath
El danced faster than he should
and raced the fire to the death
Al ran the fire to the wood.
Before the fire lost it sent an anxious breeze
to neighbor Chase or the Misses Eaton
whose wealth stood mainly there in trees.
But soon as both men knew that they'd won
and the fields again were theirs to sow
they rested there by the edge half done
where the mud was covering the snow
and the near north wind was almost down.
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Note:
"Brush Burning" is a poem that the editor of this anthology
rewrote in
Frost's style (after "Two Tramps In Mudtime") in 1997.
The poem is an elegy to a place, Berwick Maine, and to a time twenty-some
years before, when the major characters, his father-in-law Allan
Gillingham
and El Harris, and the minor characters, Alston Chase and the Misses
Eaton, still lived and 'burned while the burning's
good.'
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Mark Schorr 's
poems have appeared most recently in the Bridge Review, and he is the
editor of this anthology.
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