Five Poems by John Brantingham

The Rich Brown Scents of Acorns 

 

Midwinter I know I’m in an oak copse 

because of the acorn husks decaying  

under my feet. A small animal’s watching 

as I look down at the shells, as I stop 

and pick one up and think about surviving 

on this kind of food. People have done it 

for years, all this abundance left to rot 

except for those creatures out there watching. 

I pick up a shell and sniff it, taking 

in all that earthrichess. It’s hard to find 

a scent midwinter in the Northeast. 

Earth scents are tamped down when it is freezing 

and mostly buried under trucks’ exhaust stink. 

It’s good to palm that earthscent and breathe.

 

What Grandpa Knew 

 

Out here among the oaks, I can forget  

for a moment about the killing fields, 

towns leveled, in my name. All those dead 

stay with me, they follow me, they haunt 

me as they haunted my grandfather 

that old pacifist who refused to fight  

any man’s war, but who knew his tax bought 

killing machines for all those soldiers. 

I crouch to the earth and gather acorns 

in my hands. No one is here to watch me 

except grandpa, dead sixty years now. 

I lift handfuls of them and inhale the odors 

of the husks. Grandpa has gone back into the earth, 

and this is an earth scent, something he knows.

 

 

 

Forest Boatswain 

 

Out in the woods, I pick up an acorn  

the way I did when I was a kid 

and pull off the cap and thumb the lid 

and blow, making it whistle loud as a horn 

into the forest, which is as lonely  

today as it was when I was a child 

wanding alone half-savage, half wild 

with life, whistling to make myself happy. 

I wonder now, what I was whistling to  

then, If I was calling to someone out there 

hoping to make contact with somebody. 

I wonder what I hope hears me through 

these trees, my whistle a boatswain’s clear 

plea, but my message unknown even to me. 

 

 

 

Preparing Acorns 

 

First is the gathering. You have to get out  

into the woods just after the acorns fall, 

so the bugs and squirrels don’t get to them all 

and before they get too wet or start to rot. 

Then there is the drying and the shelling, 

and then you have to put the stock pot 

to boil to leach the tannins before you get 

to the point where you can start cooking. 

You lose yourself in the gathering. 

You lose yourself in removing the shells 

and drying and boiling them clean. You lose 

yourself and descend into the dream of feeding 

yourself. You eat them and are of this wild 

place, your body constructed of its giant trees.

 

 

 

Corvid Wergild  

 

Last month I gathered and prepared acorns,  

and now I snack on them in the late autumn,  

now in the moment after the leaves have fallen, 

and the geese are going away, now when 

I am left here with the crows who gather  

around and call to each other in the woods. 

I put one on a tree stump, watch a crow swoop 

in and take it trusting me in the matter 

of food. I suppose he trusts me just  

because food is scarce and he scavenges 

professionally. I don’t know. Maybe  

he knows this is wergild, and he trusts 

me to make good because my kind has ravaged 

the earth. Perhaps, he knows he and I are one.

John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.