Tag: leaves

Nor Spare a Sigh…

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~to a young child~

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring and Fall”

As the leaves tumble down, I think of Hopkins’ Márgarét
and her vanishing goldengrove path,
she who weeps for the loss of autumn leaves,
not knowing or remembering they will return.

And I, now older, know spring comes again,
even though wistful and sighing deeply
at the loss of beauty and innocence each autumn,
weeping for what was and may never be again.

In this blighted plight,
I tend to forget the promise made:
there is much more to come after the Fall.

My grief is not for nothing.
Christ comforts those who weep,
who mourn loss and wander lost.

I have hope and faith.
I will see beauty again.
I follow the goldengrove that leads to Him.

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Company of the Living

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The maple leaves abscond
with summer’s green rain
on such little stems
connecting to spring’s essence,
summer twigs’ foliage,
the company of the living.

But now they shrug off
their red-gold existence
as if they’d never inhabited
the verdure of the undead,
drifting to a ground
hardened by sudden frost.
~Donna Pucciani “One Minute”

I was standing lost, sunk, my hands in my pockets, gazing toward Tinker Mountain and feeling the earth reel down. All at once, I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling towards me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovered pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest. I found it in the grass; it was a maple key…Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit that bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers.

And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from outer space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes, I will think two maple keys. If I am maple key falling, at least I can twirl.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

If only there were living words as plentiful
as the maple keys that twirl from each branch,
words that release us from our dry roots,
ready to unlock life’s secrets, unlatch
and push ajar the doors to heavy hearts.

Who can ever be ready to go
from vibrant and alive,
colorful and mobile,
to dropped and still?

The reality of another spent season
is a slug to the gut.
Time is passing.
I’m wasting time.
There is no stopping it
without stopping me.

Let’s dwell in the company of the living
until we fall away together.

Live well, fellow leaves
and we’ll let go together:
swaying to a fitful wind,
giving a gentle shrug and drifting,
easing into settling down
when the time comes.

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That Point of Light

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Push on it again,
that point of light.

What do you think
light is?

What is anything?

§

If you aren’t telling kids
how to live

in a world
you can’t imagine,

what are you doing?

Telling God
about fall’s
claret-colored leaves.

§

Touch me
like you do the foliage!
~Rae Armantrout “Conversations”

There is no season
when such pleasant and sunny spots
may be lighted on,
and produce so pleasant an effect
on the feelings,
as now in October.
The sunshine is peculiarly genial;
and in sheltered places,
as on the side of a bank,
or of a barn or house,
one becomes acquainted and friendly with the sunshine.
It seems to be of a kindly and homely nature.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne from  The American Notebooks: The Centenary Edition

Of course
I reach out and touch a leaf lit like fire
though cool on the surface,
the flame for show only

I can only guess at what the world might be like
for my grandchildren
but I do know this:
the leaves will turn fiery red in the fall
before they die.

So much has changed
since my grandmother stood on her porch
and wiped away a tear at the sight
of the reddening maples on the hillside.

And so much has not changed.

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How Small a Thing

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Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.

Within the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is
almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed
light, a few leaves fall
of their own weight.

                                       The sky
is gray. It begins in mist
almost at the ground
and rises forever. The trees
rise in silence almost
natural, but not quite,
almost eternal, but
not quite.

                      What more did I
think I wanted? Here is
what has always been.
Here is what will always
be. Even in me,
the Maker of all this
returns in rest, even
to the slightest of His works,
a yellow leaf slowly
falling, and is pleased.
~Wendell Berry “VII” from This Day

What more did I think I wanted?

What always has been and always will be:

Until I’m not able to hold on in the wind and rain,
may I be a slight spot of light
in this dark and bleak world.

As I let go, when the time to finish comes,
I know my Maker’s smile
means it was all worthwhile…

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When Yellow Leaves, or None, or Few…

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That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
~William Shakespeare Sonnet 73

I used to think youth has it all
– strength, beauty, energy-
but now I know better.

There is deep treasure in slowing down,
this leisurely leave-taking;
the finite becoming infinite
with limitless loving.

Without our aging
we’d never change up
who we are
so as to become so much more:

enriched, vibrant,
shining passionately
until the very last moment
of letting go.

To love well
To love strong
To love as if
To love because
nothing else matters.

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Despite the Mess

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More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
~Ada Limón “Instructions on Not Giving Up”

It wasn’t until I paused under the huge silver maple tree in front of our house that I began to notice not the blossoms, but the way the leaves were unfurling. How suddenly a tree transformed back into a tree, with all its good green leaves. It felt like a lesson in resilience. The tree wasn’t giving up. The tree was just going to keep doing its tree thing. Noticing those leaves felt like the first moment of breath I’d had all winter. Under that tree, the line “it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me” came to me.
~Ada Limón writing about how “Instructions on Not Giving Up” came to her

I watch daily as our farm’s trees reawaken in the spring. Some, like the maples and chestnuts turn green in April. The walnuts stay naked well into May, quite bohemian compared to their glossy green neighbors.

New growth is always an encouragement to me, especially after a brutally cold winter when branches have broken off in the snows or a tree has toppled over in exhaustion from resisting the winter wind.

As leaves swell and begin to unwrap in the spring sun, trees are feeling what I feel: the need for fresh air and renewal, absorbing the warmth of the sun while new nutrients surge in my sap.

Most trees find it is easy being green, as that is who they are and that is who I am. Some are colorful show-offs, putting me to shame for my plainness. They bloom their hearts out with the joy of living yet another spring, exuberant and wild, and oh so messy.

The trees’ resilience captures my heart. Dogwood and crabapple petals follow us inside the house stuck to our shoes, left scattered here and there on the floor. Perhaps they think they can remain bright and beautiful inside a different wooden home. I sweep them up to put them back outside on the ground where they, like I will someday, become part of the soil once again.

Exuberant in my messy plainness.

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There is a tree beyond this world
In it’s ancient roots this song is curled
I am the fool whose life’s been spent
Between what’s said and what is meant
~Carrie Newcomer

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Blinking in the Sun

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And I have traveled along the contours
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool,
I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.
~Arthur Sze, from “The Shapes of Leaves” from The Redshifting Web: Poems.



…when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.
~Joyce Sutphen from “From Out the Cave”

Just like an autumn leaf, the skin on the back of my hand has a branching network of veins, like so many tributaries in a river delta. This connection between human circulation and a chlorophyll-driven photosynthesis factory suggests a mysteriously organized origin. We, formed as living breathing creatures, journey to our ultimate destination back to dust.

Together we emerge from the shadows, blinking at the bright sun, thriving under its light.

Maybe “turning over a new leaf” is for people like me who seem to be overly attracted to old leaves. For the moment, I travel along each falling leaf’s edge, in love with their colors and flaws and gradual fading transparency.

Our Creator God falls in love with each one of us for all the same reasons. He created us to live and breathe and flash brilliant in our journey, our veins flowing with gratitude for His Word and World.

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Flawless Grace

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The woods is shining this morning.
Red, gold and green, the leaves
lie on the ground, or fall,
or hang full of light in the air still.
Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes
the place it has been coming to forever.
It has not hastened here, or lagged.
See how surely it has sought itself,
its roots passing lordly through the earth.
See how without confusion it is
all that it is, and how flawless
its grace is. Running or walking, the way
is the same. Be still. Be still.
“He moves your bones, and the way is clear.”
~Wendell Berry “Grace”

If I’m confused (as I often am)
about where I’ve been,
where I am, where I’m going,
I look to the cycles of the seasons to be reminded
all things (and I) come round

what is barren will warm to the sun and bud,
what buds will open up in blossom,
what blossoms will grow lush and fruit,
what flourishes will feed, fade and fall,
come to rest and be still.

All things come round,
making the way clear.
Grace forges a path
my bones must follow.

To shine in His stillness.
How flawless His grace.

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The Month of Departure

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October is nature’s funeral month.
Nature glories in death more than in life.
The month of departure is more beautiful
than the month of coming –
October than May.

Every green thing
loves to die in bright colors.
~Henry Ward Beecher

I don’t know…
I myself feel pretty drab these days, gray and fading,
with ripples and wrinkles,
more fluff than firm.
I’m reminded to hang on to an October state of mind:
go for raucous color rather than somber funereal attire,
so when it is time to take my leave, and I want to take my time –
I go brightly, in joyous celebration of what has been~~
and knowing, without any doubt, the colors are stunning
where I’m heading when I wander down the road a piece.

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Singing in the Leaves

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Now constantly there is the sound,
quieter than rain,
of the leaves falling.

Under their loosening bright
gold, the sycamore limbs
bleach whiter.

Now the only flowers
are beeweed and aster, spray
of their white and lavender
over the brown leaves.

The calling of a crow sounds
Loud — landmark — now
that the life of summer falls
silent, and the nights grow.
~Wendell Berry “October 10” from New Collected Poems.

If I were a color, I would be green, turning to gold,
turning to bronze, turning to dust.
If I were a sound, I would patter like raindrops and children’s feet.
If I were a smell, I would be dry earth soaking up a shower.
If I were a touch, I would be a leaf landing softly.
If I were a taste, I would be a bit sweet and a bit sour.
If I were a season, I would be the wistful goodbye hug of autumn.
But I am none of these, being enough for now.
Singing in the leaves,
I will come rejoicing,
Singing in the leaves.

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