Feature on Mid-Day

After the 2018 National Poetry Writing Month, a reporter from Mid-Day.com, Suman Quazi did a write-up on four poets. I was one of the four featured poets.

Here’s the link to the article: Four Poets

The Redwoods

Day 29 NaPoWriMo 2018

I keep my head in the clouds, Sylvia. I keep myself damp,
soaking in the moisture from the Pacific Ocean.
Why fear the ants and fire? I am resilient.

You do hear the Pacific Ocean in me,
Don’t you?
I am no void, I am life personified.

But, hate is on the rise.
Fake truths is what everyone is fixated on,
Lies make rounds like an eagle, hovering.

Day in and day out, I play sentry to the skies,
Let your wings grow, join me and feel
The calm, the silence.

Except when from below, the fossilized
Smoke rises and threatens my very existence
The rain instead of nurturing, pierces me.

Hundreds of years of sunrises and sunsets
Nurtured me as I become a sanctuary
The understory have tales to tell: the madrones, the fungi, the ferns.

I rise like a tower, forty stories above the ground
The fierce winds which were benign,
Now carries the seeds of my own mortality.

The fog, that served as my natural air conditioner
Now is devoid of moisture,
How would those berries grow and the bears be fed?

I shouldn’t care, why should I care?
Let it all self-destruct like you.
Give up this struggle – this desire to be loved.

But I have affinity to all those things that has a spark
A light that shines in me and I see in others
The same light that powers our sun and the stars.

Time flows, as it inevitably does,
I personify those that come and go,
Even it the scale is different for me and you.

If I am capable of longevity than my
Trunk and the top canopy will soak
In life from every leaf and every branch.

In the nectar of new dawn,
From the ashes the phoenix shall rise and will proclaim those virtues
That justify life, that justify life, that justify life.

Notes
Today’s prompt was:

And now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on the Plath Poetry Project’s calendar. Simply pick a poem from the calendar, and then write a poem that responds or engages with your chosen Plath poem in some way.

I chose Sylvia Plath’s Poem Elm
I took the point of view of the Redwoods, to provide almost a counter-point, sort of an opposite poem to Plath.