Ashen winter skies, bare black branches. . .and abundance. Gail Mazur’s piece is born from this breathtakingly-beautiful contradiction. It is one of the finest poems about trees that I’ve ever read (though immediately a voice in my mind contradicts that statement: not trees – daughters! – one of the most loving portrayals of the mother-daughter relationship I’ve ever encountered.) And perhaps that, too, is part of the poem’s allure: it’s not about one or the other – and nothing so simple as metaphor; I experience it like a projection, through language, of a moment in a woman’s mind as she looks out at the world, her world. I can almost feel those neural branches that bear the fruit of memory, that foster the weather of emotional impulse and imagination, throwing their shadows across the snowy page. And because of that, I move along through these tercets in a kind of a winter hush, in an intimate engagement with this woman’s inner voice.

And the speaker is undoubtedly a woman – though the poem made me pray that such generative power might be part of my being as well. But if you place this poem side-by-side with another hibernal ‘tree’ poem, also written in three-line stanzas – Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” – I think you’ll sense something of the yin and yang of human consciousness. If, at this time of the year, you and I are rediscovering our “mind(s) of winter”, it may help us endure the cold season if we traverse the broad expanse and find our own place in the landscape.

Poet and educator, Gail Mazur has authored eight poetry collections, the most recent being Land’s End: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press), and from which today’s Red Letter installment is drawn. Among her many honors, Gail was finalist for the National Book Award, and recipient of numerous fellowships. The venerable Blacksmith Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA – held near the spot of Longfellow’s fabled “village smithy” and (yet another ‘tree’ poem) that “spreading chestnut-tree” – which Gail created nearly fifty years ago, is still going strong. It’s one more thing we can be grateful for as we cross another winter solstice.

Young Apple Tree, December

What you want for it you'd want

for a child: that she take hold;

that her roots find home in stony

winter soil; that she take seasons

in stride, seasons that shape and

reshape her; that like a dancer's,

her limbs grow pliant, graceful

and surprising; that she know,

in her branchings, to seek balance;

that she know when to flower, when

to wait for the returns; that she turn