three poems

by alden kirby

one

As giant trees

my aging gods are fallen now. Their round-skinned fruit,

ripened long ago,

litter the careless ground

with their sterile seed,

the color and the harvest gone.

Even the branches lie

broken, bare.

Small loss if once stalwart trunks could stand,

but the roots, disordered, scrape the sky

and the hard-bitten bark

will rot in the softly bending grass.

Yet, as if aware of some undrawn truth,

these half hundred blossoms

while they last

prove how transient is the passing hurricane.

6