Watch/listen to Kevin read “Consecration”
Video coming soon!
Notes on backstory, form, and references are below the poem.
Consecration One summer I wrote my poetry under the shade of our apple tree. My muses were the birds, who chimed with admirable diligence but made no useful observations, and lone words that hummed like bees above me in pursuit of their own purposes, crossing with mine. And, sure as blossoms wither into fruit, I pruned each bloom of sentences into a line. Then watched success make victims of them both: bird-pecked, worm-burrowed, page inked up enough to blight a heart so wholly set on growth— yet love consists of our attempts to love. I didn’t harvest a single apple or poem. Paper and pen exchanged for leaves and rake, I worked for the pride of working for my home and love of the task at hand for the hand’s own sake, treading lumps I’d hoped would gladden me, now smeared beneath the limbs they’d fallen from: returning to the soil that feeds the tree that bore them, that they never will become.
See a sample of the book
Intro, TOC, and 10 of the 40+ poems
Notes on “Consecration”
Backstory
The first house Leah and I lived in was the basement of an old duplex in southeast Provo. There was a big old neglected apple tree at the front side of the house, and since my friend and I had bought the duplex about six months before Leah and I got married, it was ours to prune. I didn’t actually sit and write under that tree more than once or twice, but as many things do, those experiences and that tree have grown in significance the more I imagine with them. I don’t ever remember taking a picture of that apple tree, and whoever bought the house chopped it down. So here’s a very cheap obviously not AI-generated apple tree, standing right where it stood before, superimposed on a Google Maps pic of the house.
Form & Techniques
The poem is five ABAB quatrains of iambic pentameter. This didn’t start a formal poem, but if I’m imposing a meaning on the experience, I suppose it just felt natural for that meaning to click.
Explanations
There’s something holy in the work of losing the self for the good of the whole, with no guarantees of ever finding it again. One of the most achingly beautiful poems of this nature I’ve ever read is Garrison Keillor’s Ode to Oregon.
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Available from Greg Kofford Books on their website and Amazon. $9.95
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