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
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