To Auden, In Sicily

“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making”
-WH Auden, In Memory Of WB Yeats.

Yet, had you seen Sicily in Autumn,
the barren dry deflaxing itself
from quartzed, deserted land;
her wizened oak mistral'd southward
and bent past recognition, tilted
in the valley of its making—

you'd have seen that tree
stretch to survive beyond shape.
And in the backdraft of Spring,
thrive on happenings altered utterly
in a great push toward warmth,
inch by ever increasing inch.