“Under sun-coined trees…”

Maine poet Ken Craft finds advice for living, as so many of us do, in the life of Henry David Thoreau, in this poem from the latest issue of Deep Wild Journal, offered here on the occasion of HDT’s 203rd birthday.

Thoreau Knows
—“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Making sense of things,
Trying to track

Nine pebbles of sadness
To their source.

Sly crows
Stole them a mile back,

But Thoreau knows
I should walk anyway

Under sun-coined trees
Thick with wood-thrush song

Till I reach undergrowth
Dense and itchy with the past

Till the air shifts and I am near
Enough to con crow talk,

Mouths full, stories dark.

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