Always becoming

I realize there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter,

how they're experts at letting things go.”

                                                          Jeffrey McDaniel

___________________________________________

The trees stand

Starkly beautiful

Bare branches reaching

Skeletal like toward

A slowly warming sky

Its seems so long ago

That they grudgingly let go

of their adornments

golden, burgundy, orange

dancing in the fall wind

swirling

to the cold earth

a necessary death

for only out of such vulnerable nakedness

can they clothe themselves

with newness

which is new for only a season

and then must be releases

as newness comes

again and

again

always becoming

until saplings

become venerable

and we rest in their shade

in the heat

of summer