OF Things So Precious and Brief: Dispatches From An Unfinished World

I am so in love with this simple yet startling piece. Doesn't it's smallness just speak volumes? Oh, I am nearly in tears over it's beauty!

by Rebecca Lindenberg

A leaf the green that a child would choose

if asked

to draw a leaf.

*

This heavy-petalled rose

is humid as the accent

of my current correspondent.

*

Trees unberried by bird.

Trees unleafed by beetle.

*

My correspondent

is a tentative man and I

am unaccustomed to tentative men.

*

White rose blossom

browning at the edges.

Paperback book.

*

Inside, my mother humming

a song I’ve never heard.

*

Kinds of holiness.

*

Trees unbarked by winter deer.

*

My correspondent

will not let me love him.

*

Green things make

such mild noise.

*

I uncross my legs

to find, with a bare foot,

that sun has warmed the stone.

I partake of the sun.

*

And the stone.

 

National Poetry Month #27