Sonnet 904
“I Can Hear Centuries”
I can hear centuries in my stove
As the bark and sweet crack of kindling
Release times past held deep inside
From tight grain that once dwarfed Drake
Watching from the heaving deck of his Golden Hinde
Creeping with plumb line along an alien shore
It almost seems heretical to use him so
Like a priest stealing incense from a church's pew
A great cedar that knew droughts and rains and snow
Only to lie upon a bed of moss recumbent now
But I sawed him anyway into human-sized rounds
Before the insects could make of him their store
Black ants and white termites and sometimes
A beetle in gleaming rush herself to procreate
So now I listen to his centuries pass
And in the intervals between his rifling cracks
Try to imagine what to him occurred
While he lived longer than any of us ever will
When he stood defiant against the storm and then the saw
This tree whose death now warms my ageing skin
Before my final fall too, like his, must surely come
By John Edwards