Poem: The Gray in the Trees

Gray settles on the land in early morning like despair
The sky gives no clue as to where morning is hiding
And only habit tells us where east and dawn should come
But dawn does not come from the east: it seeps

When the path around the Lake comes clear
The relief from darkness creeps from everywhere
Gray oozes down into the trees, to wait

Winter north forces us to talk to each other warmly
Leaning on each other verbally, for support, and hope
We try to recall how much we like the changing of the seasons

But we cannot remember what we wanted that brought us Gray
We want, instead, for light, and try not to talk about why
People who grew up loving ice and playing hockey, grow old
And move to places that do not know Gray, as we do, who
Love the changing of the seasons when they are not Gray

Sometimes the sun comes bright, harbored by the cold
When Gray is hidden in the trees, we talk to each other
Again, to recall how we like the changing of the seasons
And how nice are cleared walks and driveways unimpeded

We brighten in the folds of our own rationalizations
And find ways to remember those expatriates who came home
From Mesa and Brownsville and Paradise to die here
Where the changing of the seasons means Gray will pause

Until our loves for seasons cause our own lament

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog