A Poem: Never Ending

Hold on to the leaf turning,
it will show you how to die.

Note it change through the hues
from green to orange to yellow.
Then watch it give itself up to brown,
before the freefall.

Hold on.

Feel yourself a forgotten universe.
This is the one instant you will remember flight.

It coming back to you afresh,
as the moment before
you first came to consciousness,
when there was no need of memory.

Then lay down
with the tree a shelter above you.

Now is the time for the earth to yield
its secrets,
the Great Mother’s fertile expanse
a rich bed to enfold you.

That dying now becomes a coming home.
A new awareness of the whole
and your sacred role within it.

Hold on.

Can you feel the warmth below, above?

The earth is drawing nearer to the sun
and the days are lengthening.
There are stirrings in the earth.

The seeds are burgeoning
in preparation for their burst into
eager sprouts of green.

Look up.

See how the tips of branches are
topped with leaf bud.
Before you wish yourself amongst them
at their tender beginnings,

remember how your green leaf
decaying,
has helped give them a carpet
from which to draw sustenance.

In this great circle,
the whole is always alive.
And death is recalled again
as the great misconception it is.

And life remembered as the
cycle never ending.

Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
November 2021

~~~~~~~~~~~
Messenger
by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

love is more thicker than forget
By ee. cummings

love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky