What woodland shall my vision paint today?
Like Millais, I’ll mold each leaf of this oak,
Scribe each twig, score its trunk with a fine stroke,
With sunlit drops trim lines of green and gray.
Or perhaps like Monet, I will essay
An inward sight; the folds of a green cloak,
Heedlessly strewn, in memory evoke
Wooded foothills in mists of green and gray.
My visions like my poem, seek the real,
Beyond the real, this wood as it should be;
As in my poem’s words, I read in my Millais
From image to image toward this ideal,
Or I glimpse wood or poem in memory,
The remembrance painted in my Monet.
Robert Youngs Pelgrift, Jr. practiced law in New York City for many years and is now an editor for a legal publisher, working in New York City. His poems have been published in various anthologies and in The Lyric, The Rotary Dial and The Galway Review.
Foxglove Journal 