Autumn Tree

A tree outside my classroom as a metaphor for coming of age

I once befriended the most kindly tree I’ve ever known

It lived just feet from my classroom door

And as Autumn falls upon the students who enter the classroom walls

Fragility took hold of the tree’s leaves each school year

The leaves tugged and pulled, nestling into the wood

But alas, the wood would abandon them

And like those that came before them

They would be left to feel the frost of winter

Alone �" in the most foreign of lands

Amongst other corpses, they spent their dying moments

They slept amidst refuse that once was family

So much effort, so much…trying!

It almost makes me forget the Spring time

The pink of the leaves brightening the sun’s tangerine glow

The effortlessness of the hues, gleaming color and wonderment

They too fell apart

Encrypted and enchanted as every element of nature’s obsequiousness

An entire tree like a rose, a real rose, not a plastic model

A model that would never die, would never live

But I would rather the real rose

I would rather the inevitability of death

I would rather the moment be something that will only exist in time

A breath of happiness is not the beginning of happiness

It is happiness

It is the moment, it is the truth; it is unquestionable and undeniable and written in blood

Leaves, that fall, one on top of the other, in mounds of bright purple splendor

Fading to black

But the moment of red!

But the love!

Students sat beneath the tree, on lazy afternoon lawns

Boys and girls and sunshine on top

And when they sat they saw the dirt amongst the blades of fresh, green grass

They flicked small potato bugs that curl into black balls of shielded shell

They stood watch for bees and feared the sting

The subtle anxiety, almost like waiting

Sometimes waiting too long, they would wander back to the classroom

To sit in the structured steel of the school desk; to be rid of the wonderment of bees

But what a lesson to teach!

What a moment of learning!

To the wonderment of bees I must resign if my choice be between that and the steel

The buzz that such a mystery creates cannot be pushed aside

The body that lives in thine entity sometimes fears its own blossoming

Residing instead in black, sheltering shells

Sometimes they shatter, crashing to the ground like tumbling children on a summer’s slope

If I was to crawl to the top of the highest green hill I would like to find a small tree with red leaves

And I’d like to hold the trunk and turn into the smallest of bugs

To hold on to the glistening leaf as its energy leaves its grasp and it flutters to the wind

That moment of flight!

To whirl amidst all the others; to twist and turn with each glittering gust of long waiting wind

Flying, like a boy wearing a cape on a trampoline

Smiling from ear to ear

Knowing dinner will be ready soon