Poetry Thursday

Painting by Camilla Nock (via)

Alone In The Woods

Alone in the woods I felt
The bitter hostility of the sky and the trees
Nature has taught her creatures to hate
Man that fusses and fumes
Unquiet man
As the sap rises in the trees
As the sap paints the trees a violent green
So rises the wrath of Nature’s creatures
At man
So paints the face of Nature a violent green.
Nature is sick at man
Sick at his fuss and fume
Sick at his agonies
Sick at his gaudy mind
That drives his body
Ever more quickly
More and more
In the wrong direction.

------Stevie Smith (1902-1971) 

The website from which this poem was copied (though I found it in my copy of "Trees Be Company") has a list of 20 "similar poems", starting with these ...

1. We say we say blame the teachers Don’t we send our young to school To be taught the simple rules For decent...
2. The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees...
3. How Robin and His Outlaws Lived in The Woods Robin and his merry men : Lived just like the birds; They had almost as many tracks as thoughts, :...
4. The Way Through the Woods They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you...