Poetry of Issue #7        Page 28

Forest Murmurs for Donald Lev

And time will befall us
When voices breathe themselves
Through great open cavities and embrasures
Hollowed out of forest ents and huorns.

And hours will condense upon us
Laden with the yoke of woodland years.
Hours folding down as years pile on

Folding
As curling tongues of bark crease down
And fall from ashen pillars
In wizened groves
Licking silence in their parched demise.

But voices shall whistle on
In wheezing tones
From whittled hollows
Lost within those trunks
Where hibernate
Grim threads of grizzly sinews.

Ursine groves:
Hybernation's flood
Of mnemonic voice
In the lyric of myth and reason.

Ursine groves:
Recycling from the mud
Of verbal visions
And herbal fusions an fissions,
Enharmonic of seminal season.

Ursine groves:
Awaiting new blood
In immortal circulation,
To oxygenize and to energize;
To awake, to bestir, to prevail:
New dreams yet ensconced
To wheeze on
In an arboring, harboring,
Tree's long-laboring
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  ronald whiteurs