Blue Spruce (poem) by mary biddinger?

The Tree, or the spine

of the tree after fire.

Button strawberries

cooked crystal. How

this is every year

and natural



as the springs

path change, or hens

left the farm for wild.

It was us the storm

struck, lightning

just a slap to frame

my face at the door.



Misty on the gaslight.

Rain in fists, elk slow

to hoof the steps

from mountain, lawn,

driveway to street.

Snakes flushing

from the drainpipe



like hair ribbons

tricked from a child.

Everything chased

down. By night, red

glow in the mosses,

one random squirrel

bundling uphill.



my job is to Analyze poem's success at creating a glimpse of the human condition...

for example how the poem shows dependency? or isolation? or crisis, or anything that is a human conditionBlue Spruce (poem) by mary biddinger?
Dear question seeker, poem reader,

Although I am not a poet, I believe you should answer these two questions for yourself: In the world of the poem: what is human and what is nature?



First explore this question 渨hat is nature/natural? in order to start (re)thinking the human place in nature. Is there something intrinsic in/about nature or do all of our ideas about nature exist within a cultural context? (What is out there vs. what is in here.) Can we see nature as it really is? Can we see/sense like the tree, the springs, the hens, the elk, the face at the door, the squirrel? How do we make meaning about our environment? How do people make sense of the world we live in? Perhaps how we see nature is a cultural, human phenomenon.



Sincerely,

A question answerer, another poem reader



p.s. ';tree'; in the first line is not supposed to be capitalizedBlue Spruce (poem) by mary biddinger?
First, disabuse yourself of the notion that you're going to ';get'; the One True Interpretation of this poem, and allow yourself to look at it from several angles, to experience it, to *become* the poem. If you can do that, you're well ahead of me, because I only have one interpretation of this poem that I refuse to immerse myself into because it would overwhelm me. But here's something to think about, straight from my brain to teh interwebz where it becomes the property of Yahoo! probably:



Opening lines are important; they set the tone or the scene or whatever smart people call it. And here, you have a tree (lower case), or what the poet refers to as a ';spine'; after a fire, and she likens it to strawberries (red...fire...see?) that have been not just decimated by cooking, but also made beautiful. So you see, this tree that has been shredded by a lightning strike, though it's no longer a full, bushy tree, home to snakes and squirrels and perhaps even a source of shade for the elk, is still beautiful, though perhaps humans and animals both wouldn't recognize that, and neither would the tree itself.



And that's a lot like human nature. Sometimes we go through things that shatter us, make us feel less of who we are, and we don't recognize that as a new beginning, or that our new form has its own beauty.



I mean, I'm not academic or anything, so that's just IMHO what it might be about.



But also think that there's another perspective going on here. We the reader aren't really the tree, exactly, are we? Don't answer that攊t's rhetorical. I wish I knew what rhetorical meant. It sounded right. I like funny-looking words.



Anyway, it seems as though we have a witness to this lightning strike, several in fact (the ';us'; in line 10, in particular the ';my face'; in line 13). This tree has been crystalized, spinal-ized, but it is not alone, because whatever ';tragedy'; has befallen the tree (though the poet does not take the point of view that this *is* tragedy) has affected at least two onlookers, because ';us'; means more than one. It could be like a thousand, I don't know. If I was smart I could give you a number down to the eighth decimal.



The point is, this tree seems isolated攂ut is it really? Is it alone, and is what happened to it only of consequence to the tree? And what do you suppose is the reaction of the person in the doorway? Initially maybe fright at the lightning strike, then awe at the power of nature, then shock at the damage done, then sadness at the loss of a tree, then maybe even more awe at how the tree is still beautiful, perhaps terribly so.



Keep in mind as well, that this act of transforming, or being forcibly transformed, and witnessing these transformations, and fleeing them or being awed by them...are all natural. Lightning finds the path of least resistance, and trees, being tall, are often that path (tall things often get the short end of the stick...ha ha I made a pun! But no seriously, be nice to tall people; they get hit by more than lightning, you know LOW FLYING BALLOONS!).



So what you have here is (maybe, perhaps) an idea that we often feel that we are alone in our pain, our struggle; but really we're not. And just as often we have to bear defeat and tragedy for others, and adjust our own lives accordingly, but NONE OF THIS is unnatural. And when you bring yourself to realize that your own ';lightning strike'; may frame someone else's face (so to speak), then you understand that what we go through is both isolated and communal, both terrible and refreshing攁nd a lot of other pairs of words, yadda yadda, I'm getting tired of typing.



So you see, you're the tree, and I'm standing in a door frame. OH LOOK A SQUIRREL! HAVE FUN GOTTA GO!