The Sadness on Winter Trees

                        

 

                                             

 

Summer has an indubitable cruelty about itself while erecting

insolently upon winter ---

Encroaching foliage, choking with vibrant vitality, constricting the last

drops of breath

from skeletons with names like cottonwood,

elm

birch,

Their bones moaning from the heft trespassed

against them.

 

Where some might see beauty, I am

intrigued by the selfishness as

summer greeds what nourishment remains in brittle appendages

for it is not the fruit that sweetens the

marrow, that delicacy is designed for the

adornment of summer that

hangs from burdened limbs like an

incapable

curtain rod.

 

Summer invades like locusts, devouring everything it needs,

leaving winter trees to

suck their sustenance

through dirty rooted

straws having just enough strength to endure summer’s

assault.

 

Should summer’s brief existence be

questioned as to the stewardship of nature, on the account

virtue is not realized in such an abrupt

                                    departure?

 

Violent is the fleeing, as colors burn

in a kaleidoscope

of disaster,

shedding in littering heaps at the

feet of their host,

what gratitude awaits their hospitality,

abandonment of even a warm coat to bear them

                     through the long, frigid grey season.

 

Bowed,

broken and

scarred boughs are evidenced.

 

The truculence of summer is so

arrogant that with its exit

even the birds of song are

taken, leaving the screams and screeches of black-winged

scavengers 

to razor their 

grips into the wounded limbs of

winter.

 

Where I once looked with awe at the

pageantry of summer, I now

consider the sacrifice of winter

roots,

limbs, and

trunks 

that resemble carcasses left wastefully

behind,

I see the trails of sap that have

hardened against their round

bodies and wonder if these are really just

tears mourning what has just

happened to them and what awaits them

once again.

 

A tree cannot choose where it is 

seeded

and knows it can never leave, fate being

sealed in its

blooming.

 

I ponder if these trees are

ashamed 

by their

nakedness or

thankful in quiet reserve, hoping

winter

existence lasts

a little longer

this time.

 

10/6/2021