Because the Red Osier Dogwood
Because the red osier dogwood
Is the winter lightning,
The retention of the prime fire
In the naked and forlorn season
When snow is winner
(For he flames quietly above the shivering mouse
In the moldy tunnel,
The eggs of the grasshopper awaiting metamorphosis
Into the lands of hay and the times of the daisy,
The snake contorted in the gravel,
His brain suspended in thought
Over an abyss that summer will fill with murmuring
And frogs make laughable: the cricket-haunted time)—
I, seeing in the still red branches
The stubborn, unflinching fire of that time,
Will not believe the horror at the door, the snow-white worm
Gnawing at the edges of the mind,
The hissing tree when the sleet falls.
For because the red osier dogwood
Is the winter sentinel,
I am certain of the return of the moth
(Who was not destroyed when an August flame licked him),
And the cabbage butterfly, and all the families
Whom the sun fathers, in the cauldron of his mercy.
Copyright © by the Estate of Hyam Plutzik. All rights reserved.
Hyam Plutzik
Hyam Plutzik was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1911. During his lifetime, he published three poetry collections: Aspects of Proteus (Harper and Row, 1949), Apples from Shinar (Wesleyan University Press, 1959; 2011), and Horatio (Atheneum, 1961), all three of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Other published works include Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems (BOA Editions, 1987) and Letter from a Young Poet (Trinity/Watkinson/Books & Books, 2016). He died in 1962.