New Weather

One of the poems that makes me fall in love with words all over again. It made Paul Muldoon a poetry megastar at just 21 years old: now he is poetry editor of the New Yorker. Sparse and painfully plain. Not a word is misplaced. Pure art.

AT
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Wind and Tree

In the way that most of the wind
Happens where there are trees,

Most of the world is centred
About ourselves.

Often where the wind has gathered
The trees together and together,

One tree will take
Another in her arms and hold.

Their branches that are grinding
Madly together and together,

It is no real fire.
They are breaking each other.

Often I think I should be like
The single tree, going nowhere,

Since my own arm could not and would not
Break the other. Yet by my broken bones

I tell new weather.

by Paul Muldoon