The Yew Tree Speaks

My black fingers agitate—

I’m a tree of poems, of dead men

I’ve got a graveyard mind—

I’m a churchyard person

The cold clouds overhead—

Down below the dead

They’re deaf and dumb—

They’re all ignored

Here in Court Green—

Looking out the window

I make black statements—

Sitting at my desk

I have the blind eyes—

Of a blind pianist on a ship

I am a black yew—

Clouds scuttle by overhead

I don’t hear Beethoven—

I’m deaf and dumb to death

There is no truth to this—

No why or where to the wind

The wind, the church, the graves—

They all are a voiceless language

You/Yew and eye/I—

The tricks of morning/mourning

A world of connivance—

A graveyard of memory/amnesia

My fingers are ten trees—

Black yew, a tumult of words

An ancient Druid tower looms—

Over St. Peter’s old cemetery

My fingers are weasel noses—

They sense what’s in the yew hedge