Fascinated by green man figures, foliate heads etc as a child and an adult, the original version of this, called The Green Man, I wrote at some point in the 1990s. It started as an attempt to sound a little like Wallace Stevens, but that aspect slipped away from me.

Years later, I discovered and read Ronald Johnson’s excellent, The Book of the Green Man – which if you don’t know it, is a book-length poem, from the 1960s, well worth reading.

The Green

If Green Man woke again, what then?
Would the lie of the New World die
in the dirt, a wretched slice of history?
Or would he, synoecious being, be a she,

or neither? A potent, rotten plant-thing,
sent back to disturb us. Dipping garbage
pails, weathered hands sift human trash
amongst the crumpled scraps. A search

for poetry, or poetry in search of us?
Slumped in bars with broken boys, eyeing
hollow-headed people, blithely nodding
at the jukebox, while the world beyond

the wall is turned upside down. As whiskey
heroes weep, Green slithers back outside.
Adrift on sage flats, in the deep red middle
of Someplace, America. Twisted country

songs drift and snag on locust trees,
whistling softly, teased by unnaturally hot
breezes. Origins forgotten, before Green
ghost emerges, treeless in Window City,

disturbs a childish game with a shock
of recognition, as wicker visions lick young
minds, invoke the myth of empty pages.
Hard acorn eyes think hard, on Cowboy dirges,

and childish games. Are these the final drunk
Spring revels? What is the creature now:
dream pagan relic? Environmental prophet,
Christ? Scarecrow awakened in the mist?

Only to be misunderstood, beaten-up, arrested
and deported? Ten phrases carved in stone,
cast off. Valued no more than the way a beggar
bangs a pot? The way a plough team pulls

the plough? An endless empty vessel? There
will be no universe in seven days. The Green
shall cease there in the woods. Stand amazed,
something stonelike in stiffness, desiccated

fingers wiggle loose, very essence sent
tumbling on the winds. Bone-wood creaks
and crumbles, kicks the can and breaks
its foot. Green bewildered, as it fails and falls.