Saturday, December 10, 2016

Sycamores and Wide Open Space (an original poem)



Good morning, sycamores and wide open space.
Thank you, trees, for how you’ve brightened the
moment when I’ve gone to the window to start
each new day and found you there, stalwart and true.
You’ve stood in a gatekeeping line, overseeing
the asphalt meadow of the parking lot below,
a gray lake bed that has willingly borne the rain
and given me the joy of puddles where my child
once stomped and danced, and where the
streetlights, each night, shine in glints of gold
and silver. I will miss your empty branches in the
winter, looking like candelabra reaching to heaven,
and the wonderful wait for green buds each spring,
the full leafiness of your summery sheen, and the
yellow descent of your leaves in the fall before they
wrinkle into crackles of brown parchment below.
Thank you for the years you guarded me while I
read books on the bench, while the neighbor behind
us swept up leaves and listened in to the stories I
read to my little girl. And oh, wide open space!
How I will miss your lovely vista, the way you too
stood guard over the industrial landscape, the hills
beckoning to us over the tin roofs of the lumber yard
that, lacking outward beauty, still gave us music
whenever it rained. You have been home. You have
been a place I never expected to feel such love for,
and yet that love came, as love sometimes does,
to surprise us and strengthen us too.
I will miss you, dear sycamores and wide open space.
Thank you for being a place filled with grace.
                                                                EMP, 12/9/16

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