look im not telling you to do my homework and i know this poem is long but i dont get it i read it like five times already and i need to do a response tonight so if you guys could please read this poem and ge tme to understand it. it will only take a couple of you minutes
thank you…
LAND
By: Maurice Kenny
1976
Torn, Tattered, yet rugged
in the quick incline of bouldered hills
crab appled, cragged, lightning-struck birch, cedar;
wilderness muzzeled; forests… kitchen tables and bedposts
of foreign centuries; meadows cowed
beyond redemption, endurance, violated
by emigres’ feet, and vineyards alien
to indigenous squash and berry,
fragile lupine and iris of the pond;
while wounded willows bend in the snow
blown north by th west wind.
1820
spring lifts under drifts, saplings
hold to the breeze, larks sing, strawberries
crawl from under snow, woodchucks run
stone walls of new cemeteries and orchards;
apples blossom, thistle bloom
(Madame de Feriet’s ghost prowls the miraged bridge
spanning Black River and her mansion lanterns
glow in the clear darkness of the French dream,
hazeled in the richness of her opulence
the lands she would hold out to tenants for rent
have neither clearings nor plows;
the disillusionment loried her trucks to France,
her mansion to ashes, her bridge to dust in 1871,
her savings to pittance, her dream to agony
madame de feriet gave her french aristocratic manner
to a signpost at the edge of the country road
tangled now by yellow roses and purple vetch)
1976
april lifts from under the drifts of grey
snow piled by plows ruthless in their industrial
might to free roads and make passage
for trucks and automobiles to hurry to the grave
with dead horses in the far pasture
that no longer sustains the hunger of bleating lambs
virgin spring lifts, its muddy face scarred
and mapped with trails of progress, its smoke
rising in pine, maplem flowering aspen,
chicory weed and clods, manure of waste, whey,
abandoned farm houses and barns shaking in the wind
blind old men caught without canes in the storm;
spring bloody in its virginity , its flow corrupted
raped in zoned courts of law that struck quarried hills…
a great god’s lance thrust in the quickness of electric sun
rage of spring rivers, swollen with anger…
cold voice growling through the night… swirling,
swallowing the soft shoulders of shoreline;
the rage of the aged shakeled to history
and the crumbling bones of its frame, fisted against
the night, shaking the cane against the dark, the bats
fluttering in the balmy summer eve, fireflies creeping
through the young green grass of the long frsh meadows
1812
the north, the north aches in the bones, the land,
in the elm’s limbs gently singing in that August
breeze, bereft of holiday and festival, ghost and voice…
tunneled by gophers; ticks and fleas stuck to an old dog’s back
(General Brown marched his men to Sacketts Harbor,
struck the brittish in the red belly
and wen home to lift a pint to his deeds
and captured vices, to ville a town, erect a fence)
1976
the gooseberry is disseased, and the elm,
stone walls broken, sky cracked, pheasants
and young muskrats stertilized, and filds
