FIR-TREE

A few weeks ago, in absence of it for one or two reasons, of a real Christmas tree I mean, I decided to go back to a poem I wrote about the fir-tree once.
But I couldn't find it in the files of the computer at hand, not my usual one but, let's say, a secondary computer.
So I decided to re-write the poem trying to regrasp the original perception. But as it happens I wrote only a slightly similar poem. I am enclosing now the two poems, the first below is the more recent. I am not at all sure which of the two could be considered as the better ( Or, actually, I am maybe not even sure if it makes sense to suppose one should be better than the other). Any opinion will be cherished.


FIR-TREE.
I smelled and smelled it
as a child, my greedy nose
indulging among branches
and decorations.
I breathed eyes and wind
and the enclosed essence
of the rock skin,
needles on my knees
while I kneeled under
the dark green, in the solstice
and severe "ever" of the green
feeling protected while
befriending the boughs’
echoes of wilderness.

Time now
has passed.
I feel the border
coming closer.
And being sincere I say
I have learned something,
but not much more:
heaven if anything
was back there,
my smile under that canopy,
bathed in a bottomless stare.



FIR TREE

It’s inside now, in a vase.
It’s the time of the year when we need
a memento from the forest.
Once I smelled in it
the fullness of iron green
and was gripped and swept
into a road of breaths
and shuffling dark green.
The deep North in an instantaneous gust.
Now, to be sincere,
that smell is faint,
it’s the memory of what it was.

But I breathe it
as if I were treasuring
the few drops I could gather
from the forest sap
in my cupped hands.
More than enough
on the way to the border.