The Flowering Pear
By Tina Mozelle Braziel
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
never fruits. Yet each March blossoms burst along every branch raised over our neighbors’ bed of daffodils and glinting windmill art. Its pale petals screen dark limbs, a bridal veil drawing attention to what’s obscured. Alive and flowering, it’s unlike the windthrows or widow-makers Nick usually offers us to cut and haul to our woodpile. Generous to a fault, he grins as if we’re doing him the favor. He says it has been pretty and still is. Tells us they planted it on their wedding day. But now that Judy says it’s invasive, it has to go. Married four years to their twenty, what do we know of when to hew and root out a beginning, of how to save all that has been cultivated since? We know oak burns steady. Dogwood catches quick. Sweetgum is nearly impossible to split. Poplar puts out too little heat. And flowering pear? What else can we say? But that we need fire and wood to feed it. We’ll haul it home, fill our stove, learn something of how it burns.
Tina Mozelle Braziel won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for Known by Salt (Anhinga Press), and her book, Glass Cabin (Pulley Press), co-authored by her husband James Braziel, was named Southern Literary Review’s 2024 Poetry Book of the Year. A meditation on hope, on frustration, and on people’s places in the wilder parts of the world, Glass Cabin chronicles the thirteen years the Braziels spent building their home by hand in rural Alabama.
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Beautiful 💛.