The maiden bud, new and tender,
trembles in April’s night air.
Coaxed into a briskly warmer world
just as she stretches her bloom,
itching and aching against the growth,
she notes life as pain.
But days lengthen and the sun
shines brighter and the bud
spreads her green growth wide
to embrace the blue and gold
of June mornings.
Her trembling broadens, smooths, and
gains a grace as she dances on
the warm breezes. Even the
storms of summer cannot disquiet
her contented beauty. Each day
was made for her, she each day’s
glory. Bees and butterflies honor
her with their presence and
cannot help a flirtatious brush
as they fly by. The leaf is whole
in her full-grown world.
But late in August came an incipient rattle.
She felt a bit of youth leeched from her
generously welcoming face. Without
mirrored waters to reflect her image
she was unable to see the change.
But she felt crisp and fragile and
heard louder still a chorus of encroaching
bone and death shaking behind her.
Not until October did she finally turn
round to see a flood of red, which matched
the indistinct shades of bright yellow
and burnt orange that she saw in the distance
where once there was only green upon green
upon vibrant, lush life.
Only then did she see, then did she feel
her own stem to branch to limb to trunk
and know that she might relate.
Only then did she know her tree,
and her beautiful sisters, beautiful brothers.
Only then did she know other trees,
could she see the forest,
and know who she was.
Soon as she could revel in the beauty
of a world transcending and encompassing
and partaking in her part,
so too she could despair at the fall.
Those dearly realized relatives
that made her more she felt brushing past
with grey and brown and absence.
The world that crept round her from the
void of neglectful self-satisfaction
filled and flowed and burst with more
life than she would have ever known,
but this world, she found, was brimming
with life only in its passing, and only
its passing was stark enough to wake her
from herself.
Our bud who grew into herself through
the warmer months first knew herself
as she saw her own change
and her own growth
and her own death.
And so she fell,
content to be something bigger,
perennially new,
ever ancient,
always glorious and glorifying.