The Sunday Poem: Jungle Book part VI

VI.
The Forest

The trees stand apart from each other,
afraid to come too close,
trunks worn smooth by the streams of wolves coursing past them
and the scratching deer.

Smooth columns: this is a cathedral of trees,
a place of arches and infinite doorways
formed by branches curving silently into the air.

Stained stars hang from the vaulted boughs:
flowers of wax,
candles burning with inner light,
exuding scents and marble incense.

A place of worship where hapless trees are choked
with glacial trailing patience
until the massed weight of coils makes arches creak
in the spring rains, when elephants bellow.

Then the bough breaks
and the sound of one tree falling
reverberates like bells and bells and belltowers.

This poem is part of a series that I wrote based on Kipling’s Jungle Book. Most of the actual language came almost directly from the room descriptions I wrote for LegendMUD, where I did a Seoni jungle area (Seeonee in Kipling’s original). After doing the area, I went through the room descriptions that I liked the most and pulled out some of the wording to build poems around. There’s seven of these, but to post all seven would take almost two months, and to post them all at once would use them up too quick… so you get one now, and if you want more of these, say so. 🙂

By the way, if your image of the Jungle Book is formed by Disney, you have it all completely wrong, and should go track down a copy of the original book immediately and rectify that. A quick glance through Amazon shows that you’ll need to be careful, because there appear to be dozens of bowdlerizations available. Looks to me as if you will get the real deal if you buy the The Jungle Book (Tor Classics) and The Jungle Book II (Tor Classics). Whatever you do, don’t settle for a version that only has the Mowgli stories and “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” in it; to get the pure quill you need to have “The Undertakers” and “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” and so on.

When I showed these to my thesis advisor when I was working on my MFA, she said that they didn’t fit with the rest of the collection I was putting together, and that she didn’t like descriptive poems anyway. So much for a large portion of the canon of English-language literature…