Poetry: Leaves

Leaves have stories to tell

like that brown one basking

in the sun like being at the beach

and burning but loving the heat.

Or the crimson and curled straggler

bleeding through its last frost at

the approach of winter and suddenly

falling to a snow covered terrain.

But they hold on even in the wind

that slams them back and forth like

a screen door hanging by a hinge.

But they are not permanent, neither leaf nor tree.

They die and they disappear and they are cut down,

Burned, and infected.  They fall prey to life, too.

Neglected, an entire rainforest is destroyed

overnight as we, with our carefully selected trees

symmetrically surrounding our houses,

sleep warmly in our cotton sheets, carefully planted

in the center of our beds we dream and we rest.

Over in Haiti they say the people are piled together,

kept in close quarters and sharing

diseases like conversations.  Overnight

a large chunk of the population was

eliminated by a natural disaster.  A

little girl woke up from brain surgery

and had to relearn that her mother and

sister, overnight, were killed.   They cry

and they scream in the streets under

a government that lacks the funding

to save its own people.  It looks like war.

It looks like cutting down trees, we know

they are falling.  An entire rainforest

is destroyed overnight.