about a real event

[Luckieman]

Thanks to everyone!
I can't find any substitute for 'quietly' yet but instead of the cliche

into eternal night.

how about

into the nettled mold.

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Hi, Luckiman, welcome to the Pen!

I think this poem lands where it aims: respect, loss, resignation. Living under a mixed forest in a time of ash borers this poem hit my heart. Some notes:

Taking the thread label at its word I have an issue with “quietly”. I’ve heard a wide variety of sounds when they fall but have never experienced a two hundred year old tree falling quietly. The only way I can think of is the “If a tree falls and no one hears does it make a sound?”. I don’t think that’s what the poem has in mind and even if it did, quietly reads off to me, I think you could find a better word there.

Love the hollow and those smart bees. Eternal night is cliched, you can do better there.

Thanks for posting, I enjoyed the read.

Thanks for your comments wasellajam. Silently might not have been the optimum word. The quite massive 3 ft diameter tree actually fell with a relatively quiet whooshing sound rather than a crash (I was standing by it about 50ft away!), as it was entirely hollowed out by rot leaving a shell only about 3 inches thick, and its extensive small branches hitting the ground retarded its collapse. Can you suggest a better word that would fit the meter (3 syllables)? I'm open to any suggestions. (maybe 'suddenly'? The event was unexpected.)

' Eternal night is cliched ' - right! Thanks.

BTW, I note this forum is supposedly for 'beginners', but aren't we all beginners? 'For life is short and the art is long'. I've been writing for some 60 years but I've never had any siginficant objective feedback (until now maybe).

Whoosh is lovely and suitable, I’ll think with you on something that suits the spot.

Around here every time we have to take a tree down they take all the live ash with it, can’t tell the borers have hollowed them out until it’s too late.

The workshop titles are left over from years when the site was much busier and needed sorting, they pretty much applied to how thorough you wanted the critique to be. Although we discuss it a lot we’re unable to change the site layout at this point, consider it a quirk and post where you’d like, probably mild or intensive.

with a whoosh. Someone will definitely hate that lol, I’ll keep thinking but you’ll find something. Or maybe quietly is best.

After seven years, I was surprised

the ash tree fell so quiet. 
Its body, once a home for bees,
had been a hollow shell

for weeks (being wise, the bees had gone
their separate way a month before,
knowing it had died).    thinking more, knowing death had come. or similar might hit even harder. though I do like the incidental assonant rhyme with "quiet"

Two centuries it stood
and now it lies 
a lair for moss and worms,

reluctant
even gravity
should ever take it back.

--

something like that maybe. just think this needs a bit of elevation of the individual gestures and some clear-eyed trimming of cliche (seconding wasella's feeling that the poem can simply do better in those moments). and to avoid over sharing with lines like "bereft of its past might" - this is a good impulse to learn to resist, the Flat Editorial. it's a poem, not a textbook. usually best to not explain. and "bereft" is an uggy word, I think it wears a monocle.

love the "creeping things" but remembered some good advice from the late great Helen Vendler who might say, why be vague when you could specify? 

anyway this grabbed me immediately, a strong imagist gesture with a clear sensibility. glad to have your writing here <3

' Whoosh is lovely' -- indeed, but it seems to me to be in a different register from the language of the rest of the poem (more vernacular). I'll keep waiting for an answer to this one. thanks again.