from “Daughter of a Tree Farm”

When children can no longer devote sympathy, owing to growing up. One mind always engaged or found with labor in order to be. Later on the trees acquired winter. Sent and took and did not go out. The weight of never shedding. We anticipated a cure if come willingly. We were unable to carry out nature. These impressions, fresh, often made me to see his life previous, the principal sadness I had to recognize.

We planted trees. We cleared the pond. Gathered different, undisturbed faith. Gradually the steps further and further withdrawing over the hills, beyond the fencerow. I was too
weak. I was often driven, but saw no way. I would never go back.

The difference, between us, not because I remained the same, unable to unalter, but taken from the midst, rarely clouded, and the broken. It was this, which woke me open, opened
to an outsider, a stranger.

Credit

Copyright © 2014 by Carrie Olivia Adams. Used with permission of the author.

About this Poem

“The sequence of poems ‘Daughter of a Tree Farm’ has at its foundation an erasure of the Autobiography of Countess Tolstoy as translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf in 1922. The poems draw on this erased text, while incorporating my own words to find a synthesis of the two minds.”
Carrie Olivia Adams