The Cork Trees of the Alentejo
I take an obvious shortcut
through the cork oak
in scattered fields surrounding Evoramonte
and wind up along an abandoned railroad track
thinking of the last world war
when surely through this same landscape
not so far north of Northern Africa
and yet Europe, with olive groves
and cork stripped every ten years
for billions of bottles of wine
and the bulls wandering aimless
through the tall grasses before they are fire cut
of the deaths that must have occurred here
the Nazis set on conquering everything between
Rommel's exploits in the deserts and the continent
they already stripped of its useful history
and wondered how I would have felt then
out here, shortcutting through these fields
where anywhere there would have been
enemies, the end, the smaller world
of where one cannot hide
and the tracks run along now rusted and silent
and the station at Evoramonte cemented up
the wild oregano running up its sides
the bulls and sheep grazing aimlessly
through Europe, this Europe of another rewriting
of its trajectories, and where would I have been
had I been born before and not after
and been part of the destruction in some way
that dark center of gravity that none escape
that is the how of history but the why
never comes clear, and so we are left
with only the hints of what some say of some
for a time, before everything is again changed
and would this poem have been
or been more or less of its own cry
out of the fields where the bulls eat listlessly
and the hour of the dead trains comes somehow alive
~
words: George Moore, Lyon/Colorado (more, more & more)
image: Dorothee Lang, Germany (blueprint21)
~
another tree walk: to speak again (#12) |