The Cherry Tree

By David Wagoner b. 1926 David Wagoner

Out of the nursery and into the garden

where it rooted and survived its first hard winter,

then a few years of freedom while it blossomed,

put out its first tentative branches, withstood

the insects and the poisons for insects,

developed strange ideas about its height

and suffered the pruning of its quirks and clutters,

its self-indulgent thrusts

and the infighting of stems at cross purposes

year after year. Each April it forgot

why it couldn’t do what it had to do,

and always after blossoms, fruit, and leaf-fall,

was shown once more what simply couldn’t happen.

Its oldest branches now, the survivors carved

by knife blades, rain, and wind, are sending shoots

straight up, blood red, into the light again.

Poem copyright ©2008 by David Wagoner, whose most recent book of poetry is Good Morning and Good Night, University of Illinois Press, 2005. Reprinted from Crazyhorse, No. 73, Spring 2008, by permission of David Wagoner.

Biography

David Wagoner is recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest, often compared to his early mentor Theodore Roethke, and highly praised for his skillful, insightful and serious body of work. He has won numerous prestigious literary awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Award. The author of ten . . .

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