The Trees Said "Yes"

        1

Walk with me, 

the shadows said.

And the trees said

Yes.

Watch with me,

begged the dark, cloud-marbled sky,

until the night is weary 

and dew beckons 

like honey-drops from the lancing thorns,

and the church-bells ring through the chill air

and the dawn lashes me with stripes of gold.

Watch with me.

Walk with me.

Listen.

And the trees said 

Yes.

        2

Were you listening when

the trees said 

Yes

and

the sky said 

please

and 

every singing bird 

fell silent?

Were you speaking when

the earth groaned

and

the fish burned

and

our frozen past

melted?

Were we weeping when

we drank ashes

and

swam in sand

and

the jungles collapsed beneath our weight?

Traveling Sinuous Rivers

I have gone traveling sinuous rivers in solitude.

Am I still a traveler
who watches
who teaches
who learns?

I begin to remember
how I hid
how I mourned
how I laughed
how I loved

I feel down corridors for myself
and shake hands with someone I once discovered,
silently wondering

Am I now the person I have spent my whole life becoming?


Written on the way to a college reunion, 
with thanks, for the final line, to
Mary Catherine Bateson's "Composing a Life"

The Budding Future

Springtime and I can see the future -

Poised between rose leaves
Topping the sceptered iris
Couched in the peony buds
Dotting the fat clumps of waving raspberry stalks
Casting a cautious glance from the slim limbs of the smoke tree -

The Future:
promising - unruly - explosive

Flower buds keep their promises
unless the world turns too cold.


- May, 2019

The Waiting Crow

There is a crow that sits on our rooftop
waiting
nests in our chimney

silent
on most days

today he calls to his tribe
sable ministers crossing sunlit skies
wounding souls with sound

Suffering is real here
in this now-world there
in the will-be
waiting
nesting

silent
on most days

Meditating with Bees

Watching three bees hard at work
in purple blossoms of sage and mint
I practice radical acceptance
studying the flashing facets of a childhood memory:

screaming from pain and the shock
that my place of make-believe could harbor
this sudden venomous attack
stung by the bee and the cruel betrayal
of my beloved treehouse
wishing I could turn back time and find
another place to sit
and leave the bee in peace
to let me be
while my mother spread baking soda
on my knee

Four bees are now at work -
energy, danger, beauty, utility
held in the blooming space of my flower pot.

The world is better because of bees
and I am still
afraid.

I remember: Pre-apocalypse

I remember when summer's warmth was not
an angry hellish thing
I remember when islands did not drown
and winter did not ravage
when subway tunnels were free of floods
and mountains were covered in snow
and hurricanes and earthquakes and volcanoes
only occasionally laid waste
I remember when apocalypse was a subject
for speculative fiction
and doomsday was a war-born event
that treaties could at once prevent
I remember when humans were not dinosaurs
and water was not poison
and skies were not orange
and fish did not suffocate
and polar bears made sense

Summer, 2018

Farewell to a Tree

The cherry tree next door
Rotten to the core
Laughed so hard it split its sides.

How could that be?
That tree -
Home to hummingbirds,
Bearing blossoms whose storm-spun petals
filled the sky at the lick of a spring breeze,
Delicately dropping fruit with the kiss of June -
Must come down.

Even trees, it seems, cannot live forever.