Memory treads the needled bed beneath cathedral pines
How towering deep the pillowed hush
Latticed boughs mincing sunlight into dusty biblical shafts
Decades later this wandering Maine girl still pauses
Faint linger of pinecone pitch on wrinkling hands
Recalling the evergreen promise of profound eternity
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Copyright 2009 Deborah McGlauflin. All rights reserved.
I’ve always loved your poetry, and particularly your special collection, _Maine Girl_. I very much look forward to seeing how this develops as an avocation. You have so much lovely work to share!
“Remembering the Pines” is an ideal tone setter for what comes next.
Your beautiful poem brought back the wonderful sights and smell of the towering pines lining the paths at the Maine State YMCA camp.As one “Maine girl ” to another, keep writing your thoughts and memories in poetic form. They are a joy to read.
Remembering the Pines is the opening poem in my Maine Girl collection. I knew I wanted to anchor the collection with a poem about the towering Maine pines, under which I spent a great deal of my childhood playing and which have cast their fortunate shadow over my entire life. I had already been inspired to write a decent little verse, but I felt it was still missing something and had set the poem aside to let it gestate.
Where I now live with my husband and collie on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, we have scrub pines on our property, which borders a tidal pond. These small and scruffy pines are mere echoes of the grand Maine pines I knew as a child. But they are pines nonetheless, and I revere them as such. One day, I was trimming dead branches and, inevitably, got pine pitch on my hands. Suddenly, the sharp smell and stickiness of the resin broke through layers of forgetfulness. I was transported back to my childhood by a startlingly vivid flood of long-forgotten memories. At the same time, however, this feeling of being swept back in time was sharply juxtaposed with a very clear recognition of the here and now that was tied to a third sense — the sight of my aging, wrinkled hands.
I instantly knew that this arresting paradox was at the heart of what I needed to add and convey. And so, a poem that had started as an evocative but impersonal description of light sifting through the cathedral Maine pines and the springy feel of a pine bed underfoot also became a very personal reflection on being at peace with one’s mortality. The process of polishing Remembering the Pines taught me something about writing poetry. It is simply this: the resonance between a poem and the life of the poet can be powerfully enhanced by memories anchored deeply in our subconscious by physical sensory experiences. As poets, we can choose to be alert to these sensory anchors’ part in the creative process and to explore and communicate the thoughts and emotions they trigger. If we do, we may more strongly evoke the reader’s own remembrance.
Of course, it is also true that memories are imperfect and distorted. But, as Percy Shelley said in “A Defence of Poetry†in 1851, “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.â€