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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Amy Lowell

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Camellia Tree of Matsue

Amy Lowell

From “Lacquer Prints”

AT Matsue

There was a Camellia Tree of great beauty

Whose blossoms were white as honey wax

Splashed and streaked with the pink of fair coral.

At night

When the moon rose in the sky,

The Camellia Tree would leave its place

By the gateway,

And wander up and down the garden,

Trailing its roots behind it

Like a train of rustling silk.

The people in the house,

Hearing the scrape of them upon the gravel,

Looked out into the garden

And saw the tree,

With its flowers erect and peering,

Pressed against the shojii.

Many nights the tree walked about the garden,

Until the women and children

Became frightened,

And the Master of the house

Ordered that the tree be cut down.

But when the gardener brought his axe

And struck at the trunk of the tree,

There spouted forth a stream of dark blood;

And when the stump was torn up,

The hole quivered like an open wound.