One Tree
Hope is such a strange companion.
Sometimes it is easy, cheerful, joyous even, like of course!
Sometimes it seems unreliable and demonstrably incompetent, like what a completely crackpot notion…yeah, that is never going to happen!
Sometimes it feels so greeting-card, like stop with the patronizing optimistic platitudes!
And then it is a motor in the spirit that refuses to take what seems obvious or inevitable as final.
That’s why it is the energy injustice fears the most: warns us against to protect you from disappointment; tries to bury with sugar and distraction; scorns and disparages with solemn declarations of failure; paints with buckets of lies; or just plain pounds again and again with threat, bludgeon, and dungeon.
And that’s because they know its strange resilience.
November…end of Daylight Savings Time…up North here, the season of diminished light.
The right time to claim it in all its frailty, imperfection and might…because the gift of hope is unqualified persistence.
One Tree
Bare limbs reclaim the hills resting till spring unsleeved. A single aspen holds ten thousand leaves… a golden claim to permanence no-one quite believes. The last dome of color left… the bleak heart rallies… such boldness claims our wintering valley.
Beautiful, Scudder.
Love the photo, perfect for the poem.
And love the spare, vivid three stanzas of the poem. Lovely in its austerity, like the season.
👍🙏🏼💙
I love the fall trees. I also really love the trees when they are completely exposed without their leaves.
Lovely poem and thoughts about hope.