Kinship by the roadside
A March Poem: Gifted Beauty
You fell upon my path,
Yellow petals twirling in the breeze.
I bent to pick you up,
offering your beauty to the one beside me.
"A gift for you today, from this kin of ours."
He took you in his hands and held you to his nose.
Shook his head.
"No," he said, "Doesn’t smell too good."
So I placed you in my palms instead,
studied the soft glow of your core,
Your style,
golden-yellow as the bananas,
balancing in the basket,
of the woman passing by.
I brought you to my nose
And felt the soothing,
light citrus smell
Your touch fair to the skin
"What beauty!" I thought.
So we bade farewell to your home,
our kin who stood by the roadside,
she who had decided it was time to part.
‘Abscission,’ they would call it,
But 'Joy, I preferred.
You sat between my fingers,
and we watched the geese trace the sky,
turning it into a dance floor.
A ‘V,’ then a ‘W,’ then what looked like a feather.
“Who leads them?” I asked you,
“How do they know to trust,
the wind,
the one beside them,
the path unmarked?”
And then I thought of the tree
your home,
my kin,
she who had let go,
knowing the earth would take you in,
knowing you would soon nourish,
the heart of another.
Softly, I heard you whisper,
“Even the petal that shrivels
still carries the sun within.
Pick her up.
Carry her gently.
Let her drink the twilight light,
let her feel the sky,
let her dance like the geese,
heeding the call to their imagination,
heading home, again.”