A PRIZE POEM FROM PLANT PARTS

Any old tree will do, one with its heartwood
Exposed to the anatomy of poetry, any old
Sap can twig you with their branch of knowledge
Any old tree will do, if one can lop it at the right
Angle, so it will fall on a judge, best it be oak,
Hundreds of years old, difficult for them to dislodge,
Tons of history, from Chaucer to the misunderstood
On the internet, the green leaves spread out,
One takes them in hand, and reads the future
in the venation, follow the veins and the signs
to the serrated edge, then talk of to be loved
in terms of a season, budded in the cafe in Berlin,
while, and you see this in the pattern, you write
a poem about an old tree, he or she, in the light
of a Spring day, cast in golden ray, is in a word,
Life, now you capture, regeneration, the Green,
show your corporate responsibility, by a quote
from Thoreau, though you need to italicise
the experience, make sure you keep it remote
Next you lumber your reader with a list
like Edmund Spenser, of trees and of vegetation
you know that the act, the sexual union
needs some padding, some mot of suspense
But you could, have the gall, to think Kinsey,
And then the wasp, a conceit, stings them in the eye,
They are then blind to the awful paraphrase,
You know too that, vennation, is one letter away
So, you can graft Agatha Christie to the plot,
Then it is, from the seed grows a Billy Crudup,
Staged beauty, in the bark, from Othello
you go to dogwood, and Desmond Morris
to naked poet, revealed as the rings of a tree
to divination and misinterpretation and OH
The poem, an automaton now, wins by itself.